July 14, 2009 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – FastScale® Technology, Inc, provider of award-winning software platforms for next generation data centers, has announced the introduction of FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 Enterprise Edition. The flagship product in FastScale's integrated family of software platforms and solutions, the new FastScale Composer Suite is the most advanced solution on the market for building, optimizing, managing and deploying server software in physical, virtual and now cloud-based environments.
"Next generation data centers are becoming increasingly complex and highly virtualized, requiring management process and tools across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure," said Mark Bowker, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 helps business seek an improved return on their investment by providing an integrated suite of tools that automates the process of building, managing and deploying of application workloads - significantly improving the efficiency and optimization of the environment."
FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 utilizes a logical server infrastructure that enables system administrators to 'build once, deploy anywhere' and provides a standards-based approach to managing server software throughout its lifecycle. With logical servers, administrators can plan, deploy, re-deploy, scale out, and manage server builds in hybrid environments without making changes to the software stack.
FastScale's patent-pending Application Blueprinting™ technology allows users to build lightweight logical servers that are up to 95% smaller with 'just enough operating system' (JeOS) - automatically. The new release also provides a full spectrum of automated and iterative tools for optimizing traditional software environments. Powerful new analytical and visualization tools enable roles-based Windows and Red Hat server configurations to be specified and easily customized and configured. Rich web-based settings management allows policy-based standardization as well as fine-grained customization of all logical server configurations, both lightweight and traditional.
"Building on the already successful multi-year relationship with FastScale, Informatica anticipates further deploying the FastScale Composer Suite across a wide range of environments - physical, virtual and cloud - in order to manage the company's server software globally," said Tony Young, CIO of Informatica. "The FastScale solution will be a critical component for building rapidly deployable lightweight environments as well as for managing and tracking all of Informatica's server configurations. Informatica and FastScale plan to team together to achieve an outstanding level of automation that we anticipate will increase VMware density, reduce administration costs and lessen downtime - all of which will have an impact on our bottom line, which is valuable to me as a CIO."
FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 extends the deployment and management capabilities beyond bare-metal servers and VMware® Infrastructure to the Amazon® Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The enterprise-class software repository, a key component of FastScale's management infrastructure, maintains a complete history of all software assets, logical servers, roles and usage. Now, software environments deployed to Amazon EC2 can be managed centrally with robust traceability and reproducibility of the software repository - FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 provides common infrastructure for managing all physical, virtual and cloud-based servers.
New features of FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 Enterprise Edition include:
*Stack Optimization Tools – enable lightweight server builds that are up to 95% smaller, inherently more secure, with dramatically reduced memory, processor and disk usage. For traditional server builds, analytical and visualization tools enable users to quickly and easily analyze servers by role-based OS profile and then optimize by package group, file type or directory hierarchy.
*Intelligent Stack Editor™ – provides a graphical dashboard for easy configuration and customization of optimized logical servers, including complex multi-tiered applications. Files, directories and packages are easily added or deleted, and dynamic size calculations are visible as logical servers are defined and customized.
*Robust Configuration Settings – enables policy-based, hierarchical configuration settings to be applied to logical servers or groups of logical servers to customize network information, security policies, environment variables, application configuration files, enable shell scripts, and more.
*Software Repository – enhanced to support cloud-based deployment and provides centralized version management, tracking, traceability, and reproducibility of all software assets including operating systems, applications, configuration files, patches, logical server specifications, roles, permissions, scripts, metadata, and logs.
*Dynamic Provisioning – allows server builds to be deployed on-demand to VMware Infrastructure, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or bare metal servers.
"FastScale Composer Suite is an innovative solution for automated management of server software across disparate environments spanning physical, virtual and cloud," said Ivan Perez, VP of Information Technologies, Extron Electronics. "From building lightweight environments that can be deployed quickly to managing and tracking all of our configurations, FastScale promises to deliver an unprecedented level of automation. For us, this can result in increased VMware density, reduced administration costs, and less downtime - all of the measurements that have the greatest impact on our bottom line."
"In a climate of constrained resources, IT organizations are struggling keep up. Multiple management and deployment solutions that target different operating environments simply cannot provide the level of automation needed," said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale Technology. "The only way to address this is with an integrated platform designed from the ground up to support dynamic deployment in heterogeneous environments spanning physical, virtual and cloud-based implementations. This is exactly where FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 excels."
