Introduction

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WebSphere portal technology facilitates information exchange for users delivering services that connect people, employees, customers, or trading partners to business content and to each other. IBM offers a portal solution that promotes total ease-of-use whether you are making critical business functions accessible online, working offline to access applications and data, or assembling information in different formats from various databases and applications.

IBM customers are implementing a variety of business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-employee (B2E) portals using IBM's WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms. Many of these implementations have become successful and popular with their users, and with significant growth in use are becoming essential communication vehicles for their business owners with a corresponding requirement to maximize availability.

Because of the growth of these portals and their increasingly critical nature, the IBM High-Volume Web Sites team undertook a study of workload management in heavily loaded WebSphere Portal clusters with particular focus on minimizing the user-visible impact of failures.

The primary objectives of the study were to verify the success of workload redistribution at times of failure and recovery in the Web site infrastructure, and to derive best practices advice for IBM customers, IBM account teams, IBM business partners, and other interested parties to help minimize the user-visible effect of failures.

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