If you feel overwhelmed by the number and variety of storage products that are available today, you are not alone. Some would tell you that it is now time to store everything on disk. At first thought, this may sound like a good idea but have you overlooked anything? Are you aware that both tape and disk products incorporate the same magnetic recording technology enhancements? Yes, cost per gigabyte continues to plummet but tape is keeping pace by maintaining an order of magnitude advantage over disk. Alas, it is not about tape versus disk. It’s all about putting your data in the right place at the right time, a concept increasingly referred to as Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). This discussion will focus on the overall solution of storing, managing, replicating and integrating your data in the most cost-effective manner. We will take a look at where the magnetic recording industry is going and when we might require a totally new technology. We will discuss a number of the currently available alternatives (both hardware and software) that would facilitate your overall storage management solution.

With data volumes exploding and the number of new applications and users accessing data growing exponentially, it is becoming more and more difficult to provide consistent levels of performance and scalability for critical business applications. With budgets being flat, capacity management decisions related to the selection of the architecture and hardware platform, as well as justification of the hardware upgrades, requires a thorough analysis of the alternatives and justification of the proposed solutions.

In this presentation, we will review a strategic performance management approach to planning, managing, and controlling the growth and usage of resources and data by data warehouse applications based on Oracle, DB2 UDB ESE and Teradata DBMS. Several case studies will illustrate how to set up and manage performance expectations for new and growing environments.

Tuning and trouble shooting application performance problems can at times be compared to "black art". Isolating specific problems is seldom simple and straight forward. To get the best performance out of your applications you might overlook the performance of the storage subsystem and its interaction with the server.

This presentation will walk through the performance characteristics from the lowest disk drive level, to the Fibre Channel loop, Host Bus Adapters and the importance of knowing your server I/O channels.

FICON, the next generation of ESCON, runs as a layer four protocol over Fibre Channels, and has 10-times the bandwidth of ESCON. Conversion from ESCON to FICON brings not only performance improvements, but allows mainframe environments to simplify and more effectively manage their enterprise data and applications. Mike Martin’s FICON primer presentation describes the differences between ESCON and FICON and provides additional information on how FICON delivers improvements to enterprise environments. Mike’s presentation includes a discussion of case studies covering ESCON to FICON conversions, challenges and benefits.