In May, the Southfield, Mich.-based automotive industry market research company finished moving its main 4TB customer-facing data warehouse to an Oracle 10g grid comprised of Dell PowerEdge servers running Linux.

The move has helped R.L. Polk save money and improve data redundancy, availability and access time. It also supports Polk's new service-oriented architecture, which is improving customer service, Vasconi said.

"We are getting more bang for our buck," he said. The data warehouse is doing 10 million transactions a day "without any issues."

Encouraged by the experience so far, R.L. Polk is bringing onto the grid other databases, both domestic and overseas, that total 2.5 petabytes of actively managed data. It's a process that will take at least 18 months, Vasconi said. And the amount of data is expected to grow 30 percent per year for the foreseeable future.

Founded in 1870 -- the same year the automobile's predecessor, a motorized handcart, was invented in Germany - R.L. Polk started as a publisher of business directories. It became a car information supplier in 1921 and began using computer punch cards in 1951. The company is best known to consumers for its Carfax database of car histories.