Biographical Sketch: Bob Kern is a Executive IT Architect in the IBM Americas Advanced Technical Support organization. Bob has 37 years of experience in large system design and development and holds numerous patents in Storage related topics. For the last 28 years, Bob has specialized in disk device support and is a recognized expert in continuous availability, disaster recovery and real time disk mirroring. He created the DFSMS/MVS subcomponents for Asynchronous Operations Manager and the System Data Mover. Bob is an IBM Master Inventor and is one of the inventors of Concurrent Copy, PPRC, XRC and GDPS. He continues to focus in the Disk Storage Architecture area on HW/SW solutions focused on Continuous Availability, and Data Replication. He is also a member of the GDPS core architecture team with focus on storage related aspects. Bob can be reached at bobkern@us.ibm.com.