FastScale Introduces Stack Manager Workgroup Edition

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, June 01 2009

New platform for building, optimizing and managing logical servers in next generation data centers provides robust software stack configuration and optimization tools with unified management infrastructure for adaptive physical, virtual and cloud-based computing environments

Santa Clara, Calif., June 1, 2009 - FastScale Technology, Inc, provider of award-winning software platforms for next generation data centers, today announced the introduction of FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition, a new product that enables enterprise IT and engineering teams to easily create, optimize and manage logical servers for deployment in physical, virtual or cloud environments.  Logical servers enable a ‘build once, deploy anywhere' methodology to support complex, dynamic and hybrid server infrastructure and allow a consistent approach to creating and managing physical and virtual machines throughout server lifecycles.  FastScale Stack Manager provides a central platform with a one-button solution for administrators who need dynamic yet optimized server builds.

FastScale Stack Manager incorporates patent-pending Application Blueprintingä technology to automatically generate logical servers with ‘just enough operating system' (JeOS) and deliver lightweight server builds that are up to 95% smaller, inherently more secure, with dramatically reduced memory, processor and disk usage. In addition, new visualization and stack optimization tools enable users to quickly and easily analyze servers with a full operating system profile and then optimize by package group, file type or directory hierarchy with dynamic size calculations that support the assessment.  The result can be compared to the FastScale Application Blueprint as an insurance policy against creating a server build with missing file dependencies - omitted files are easily added with a mouse click.  Rich web based settings management allows policy-based standardization as well as fine-grained customization of logical server configurations.

"FastScale Stack Manager enables our team to quickly optimize a variety of our hosting environments across both physical and virtual machines," said Seth Hak, CEO of Sigma Host LLC.  "As a result, we can provide our clients with more efficient application execution and improved security as differentiators.  The added ability to increase hosting density in our virtual server farm will have an immediate positive impact on our bottom line."

In addition to the most automated, iterative and robust set of capabilities available to build and optimize logical servers for Windows, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based application environments, an enterprise-class software repository enables lifecycle management of logical server specifications, software assets, roles, permissions, history, and metadata for complete tracking, traceability and reproducibility.  When a server deployment is needed, FastScale Stack Manager will create the appropriate output format on-demand from components stored in the repository, according to the logical server specification.

"Addressing the complexity and diversity of next generation data centers requires platforms and tools that readily abstract the logical design from the physical deployment.  Otherwise, management, time and cost become prohibitive," said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale Technology.  "Over fifty customers from a range of industries participated in our beta cycle for FastScale Stack Manager, and we consistently heard that our technology delivers a new class of automation for optimizing and managing complex software in a dynamic, multi-platform data center."

Key features of FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition include:

• Software Repository - centralizes 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. 
• Application Blueprint - automatically identifies the precise operating system dependencies of an application without manual effort.  Any given application only uses a small subset of a general purpose operating system, and the Application Blueprint calculates those dependencies automatically in seconds.
• 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. A complete version history is maintained in the software repository.
• Flexible Deployment Formats - allow logical servers to be output in VMDK, AMI or disk image formats, on-demand, for deployment to VMwareâ Infrastructure, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or bare metal servers.

FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition is available now, and pricing starts at $25,000 for five users. For more information, click here .

About FastScale Technology

FastScale Technology delivers integrated software platforms and solutions for next generation data centers. Through its patent-pending technologies, FastScale enables complex IT organizations to build, optimize, manage and deploy server software environments with unparalleled simplicity, flexibility and security while achieving dramatic lifecycle cost savings and server utilization improvement. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, FastScale is a privately held company backed by leading venture capital firms including ATA Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures and Hunt Ventures. For more information, visit www.fastscale.com.