Many enterprise-class organizations are completely dependent on IT to run their business. Factory floors cannot sit idle. Web sites cannot go down. Transaction systems cannot lose transactions. Enterprise-class organizations must be continuously operational to stay competitive and will do whatever steps are necessary to roll out their own custom, highly available solutions to ensure that these failures do not occur.

IBM offers many products that can be used to craft highly available solutions. But because you are not necessarily going to purchase the products together, you cannot assume all the other pieces are going to be readily available. This means you must configure each product out-of-the-box to run independently. The challenge is to build a ready-to-go solution that will meet the performance and scale requirements of enterprise-class organizations.

This series of articles from the IBM Continuous Computing team presents a blueprint to help you address this challenge and provides details on completing the following steps to build a scalable solution platform that offers high availability throughout. You'll learn how to:

• Assemble a highly available hardware platform
• Install and configure IBM TotalStorage® SAN File System
• Install and configure IBM WebSphere® software for better high-availability capability
• Install and configure IBM DB2® software for better high-availability capability
• Implement a highly available network edge
• Test the solution
• Automate the solution
• Enhance high-availability capability through emerging technologies
• Implement multisite failover

Link to project implementation.