FastScale announced the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite. FastScale Composer Suite fully automates the process of building, managing and deploying server software environments for enterprise class data centers and Web farms, whether the infrastructure is physical, virtual or both. The new release extends the benefits of FastScale’s sleek software management solution to Windows Server 2003 environments, adds new capabilities in lightweight application provisioning, and delivers a range of scalability and usability enhancements.

“A recent ESG survey showed that virtual machine growth in production environments will more than double over the next two years, leading to complex hybrid infrastructures comprised of Windows and Linux servers in both physical and virtual environments,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “With the new release, FastScale Composer Suite now delivers a unified infrastructure for managing these hybrid environments, eliminating the need to integrate disparate technologies and methodologies.”

FastScale Composer Suite was designed specifically to eliminate the labor-intensive process of building and managing server software environments throughout the lifecycle. With FastScale Composer Suite software environments average 95% smaller than traditional golden images, are built on-demand and deployed to bare-metal or virtual servers – in seconds to minutes.

Because FastScale software environments are so compact, the entire server infrastructure is a dynamic pool of compute resources, able to run any Windows or Linux application at any time. In addition to the support of heterogeneous server environments, the new FastScale solution builds on the company’s patent-pending Application Blueprinting technology and its minimalist operating system deployment model to now deliver lightweight, just-in-time provisioning of the application layer. For large, modular enterprise applications, the entire software stack can now be streamlined automatically based on workload requirements, with only the necessary files provisioned. FastScale’s software component repository enables dynamic retrieval of any files not included in the lightweight provisioning, ensuring full application compatibility. This new lightweight application provisioning allows for the deployment of the smallest possible software stack, decreases memory requirements, supports stateless server configurations, and increases virtual server density by 3X or more.

“Our IT organization supports a large number of constituents, both internal and external, and as a result our infrastructure is diverse and complex. We run a combination of physical and virtual machines with both Windows and Linux servers,” said Tony Young, CIO of Informatica. “The new capabilities FastScale is introducing allow us to have a cohesive platform to manage both our physical and virtual servers. Most importantly, the small memory footprint of the FastScale software environments gives us increased performance and allows us to further consolidate our servers.”

New features include:
New platform support – including deployment of Windows Server 2003 and RHEL 5.2 environments.
Lightweight application provisioning – for just-in-time, virtualized deployment of modular, enterprise class applications, enabling increased infrastructure performanc
and stateless server configurations.
Increased scalability & usability – with streamlined configuration settings, enhanced Web and command line interfaces, and easier navigation for large enterprise
deployments.

“Since its introduction last year, FastScale Composer Suite has been deployed in large-scale Linux environments in a wide range of enterprise use cases and has exceeded all of our expectations,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale. “As the deployment of virtualization increases in production environments, we hear daily that customers need a solution to manage the hybrid mix of physical and virtual machines spanning both Linux and Windows environments. We are very excited to be able to offer such a powerful and streamlined solution to address such a complex and broad-based industry problem.”