Data is one the most critical and valuable assets of a business. Critical strategic decisions can be made more quickly and effectively when they are based on complete, accurate, and timely operational data. From this point of view, it is important to have an enterprise data management architecture that supports a flexible global view of the business. Many environments today are heterogeneous with a high quantity and diversity of data. In this IBM® Redbooks® publication, we help enterprise architects and IT managers with these environments make decisions for a centralized database or data warehouse. We recommend a centralized data management environment on Linux® on System z®. We include guidance for IBM z/VSETM and Linux specialists to reorganize existing IBM DB2® VSE data and build a database environment with continuous operation in Linux on System z. We begin this book by describing the possibilities and advantages of enterprise data management and different technical ways to realize it. Then we discuss planning, which is important for setting the foundation of the architecture that is implemented. We explain the hardware considerations for capacity and performance planning. For the z/VSE system and Linux on System z, we describe considerations for operation in a logical partition (LPAR) and in a virtualized environment with IBM z/VM®. In addition, we discuss the disk behavior for different workloads, storage dependencies, network connections, and DB2 database considerations. We also guide you in customizing the DB2 server for z/VSE, z/VM, and DB2 on Linux to allow existing z/VSE and z/VM applications to access the database on Linux on System z. We include the data migration, application considerations, dependencies, compatibility, monitoring, and tuning possibilities in such an environment.