In the survey, which was conducted for the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) in September and released this month, 60 percent of the 366 respondents said a lack of available storage has affected the performance of their databases. Ten percent said performance has been significantly affected. A total of 46 percent said that the availability of their databases has been affected by storage capacity issues. And 43 percent said they have delayed application rollouts because of a lack of storage resources.

At Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. (CME), the number of Buy and Sell contracts being processed per day has grown nearly sixfold over the past six years, from 917,000 in 2000 to nearly 5.5 million last year.

As a result, the exchange is perpetually running out of free disk space for its Oracle databases, according to Joel Kulesa, a storage technology specialist at the CME. To help free up space, the exchange uses techniques such as hierarchical storage management, data classification and archiving, Kulesa said via e-mail.

Performance anxiety

The CME faces an even bigger problem, though: The performance of disk drives isn't increasing fast enough to meet its processing requirements, Kulesa said. 'Balancing growing capacity needs with increasing performance demands has been the real challenge we're facing,' he added.