Abstract: Recent projects have stressed the "need for speed" while handling large amounts of data, with near zero downtime. An analysis of multiple environments has identified optimizations and architectures that improve both performance and reliability. The session covers data gathering and analysis, discussing everything from the network (multiple NICs, nearby catalogs, high speed Ethernet), to the latest features of extreme scale. Performance analysis helps pinpoint where time is spent (bottlenecks) and we discuss optimization techniques (MQ tuning, IIB performance best practices) as well as helpful IBM support pacs. Log Analysis pinpoints system stress points (e.g. CPU starvation) and steps on the path to near zero downtime.