  September 2005 Increasing reliance on the Web as a technology base for Internet and intranet applications continues to drive the growth in innovation and sophistication of the application infrastructure. The dramatic rise in the functionality and scalability of middleware solutions are fueling a tremendous increase in their use to meet expanding business requirements. WebSphere Portal Server is a key middleware product used for delivering dynamic information, executing business processes, and interacting with portal users. Its advanced features are accomplished by leveraging layered software products, such as IBM WebSphere® Application Server, DB2® Universal Database™, and IBM Tivoli® Directory Server. As a developer, you can leverage this middleware to build your own applications, portlets, and dynamic content. To survive in an on demand world, being able to quickly adapt resources for specific users or applications is a key business requirement. Applying additional servers to a generic computation problem is a relatively simple exercise. To do so for layered middleware products, however, requires correctly installing and configuring the software before assigning resources to users. As a result, managing installation and configuration choices of layered products becomes increasing complex. If you're utilizing middleware products to deliver your own applications, you should be allowed to focus on your business applications and rely on the middleware provider for delivering the resource management capabilities of those products. Automation of repeatable tasks is a strategic approach for simplifying the management of complex enterprise software installations. IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator provides automation capabilities for managing the hardware and software components of an enterprise data center. Software provisioning refers to the steps required to install and configure software and its prerequisites. In addition to hardware and software provisioning, Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator also provides the foundation of an autonomic computing solution by delivering a monitor-analyze-plan-execute (MAPE) loop for fully automated control of data center resources to meet application requirements. This series of articles from the IBM Advanced Design and Technology team focuses on using Tivoli automation products to facilitate the rapid deployment of portal servers. Follow along as our project team uses Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator to produce a solution that automatically performs all the steps required to leverage data center assets to replicate portal servers and to expand and shrink portal server clusters based on demand. Link to project implementation.
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