Although the majority of databases Helle had run involved Oracle on Unix, for speed and cost reasons he chose a Hewlett-Packard Co. DL 585 server using four AMD Opteron processors with Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux operating system. That configuration cost about US$40,000, versus $2 million for the prior SQL Server-based system.

That price doesn't include the storage, which Helle acknowledged was expensive. But it is also large: The HP StorageWorks XP1200 disk array can store 330TB, which Helle thinks should easily last him five years. Just in case, though, the HP can manage a total of 3 petabytes via auxiliary systems.

Helle is also testing Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) to help ease future growth.