FastScale Offers its Virtualization Provisioning Answer

FastScale Technology, Inc. has come out of stealth mode with guns-a-blazing as it introduces its software virtualization and provisioning solution for datacenters – FastScale Composer Suite.

The company comes out with claims that by automating the process of streamlining server software, virtualizing the environment and then provisioning in only seconds, they can deliver a scalable and dynamic software infrastructure that can increase overall server utilization to more than 90 percent and decrease system administration by 75 percent or more.

“Current data center automation offerings focus on managing server sprawl symptoms like software deployment,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale. “Only FastScale Composer addresses the root cause of software complexity by fully automating the process of building highly streamlined server software, on the front-end, while dynamically deploying and seamlessly managing the environments on the back-end. Early customer feedback on our unique approach has been incredibly positive with one CIO describing FastScale Composer as ‘the most significant innovation to the concept of a golden image in 20 years.'”

Although originally considered a time saving concept within virtualization, golden images or template images are causing many customers a lot of heartache and man-hours trying to build, manage and keep them current. FastScale hopes to remove customer dependence on these images.

According to the company, with FastScale Composer, software environments average 99 percent smaller than traditional software images, are built on-demand and reside on servers only for the duration of the job in process. Once complete, the server is available for automatic provisioning of a new software environment in under a minute.

FastScale said that ease of use was a primary design consideration for Composer. System administrators benefit from flexible rules-based mapping and automatic patch and configuration management. The company also claims that in addition to a highly intuitive user interface, the system can be installed and operational within two hours.

According to one of the current beta customers, “FastScale Composer enables us easily to provision new machines to handle peak loads as well as providing exceptional support for platform migrations.”

Key innovations of FastScale Composer include:

• Application Blueprint – While operating systems support hundreds of thousands of applications, any given application only uses a small subset of the operating system. The Application Blueprint automatically identifies the precise operating system components an application requires at execution time, without any manual effort.

• Dynamic Application Bundle – Based on the Application Blueprint, FastScale Composer automatically builds a small, full-featured software environment including only the precise software components required. Averaging only one percent the size of traditional server images, the Dynamic Application Bundle (DABTM) is created on-demand at job execution time, so it always includes the appropriate updates and patches.

• Lightweight Provisioning – With the DAB’s small footprint, provisioning to bare metal servers takes seconds, as opposed to an hour or more. The application software stack is small enough to run in memory, so diskless configurations are easily supported. When a job is complete, the server is available for provisioning of a new DAB – all in under a minute.

To run FastScale Composer Suite, a DB2-based software repository is used and is supplied and included in the price of the Suite; a dedicated management server is also needed. Pricing starts at $30,000. Currently, the product only works with Linux-based servers, but the company hopes to add Windows support by the end of the year.