On-Line Admin Help

I am pretty new to the concepts of ON-Line. I have a good background using the old standard engine. I am trying to understand and configure space for raw slices for a new database. Is there any book, besides the Informix manuals, or a simple method to do space planning to properly create an On-line database. We are not going to be doing any client/server. We are strictly going to be having all of the users log into the Unix machine and access the database while logged in directly from dumb terminals, PCs with emulators, etc. Any help is appreciated.