Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
New Release of FastScale Composer Suite Provides Industry’s Most Robust Platform for Optimizing, Managing and Deploying Software in Next Generation Data Centers
FastScale® Technology, Inc, provider of award-winning
software platforms for next generation data centers, today 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.”
FastScale Composer Suite was designed specifically to address the
complexity of next generation data centers by delivering an integrated
software management platform to build, optimize, manage and deploy
server software for your entire enterprise – whether physical or
virtual, Windows or Linux. Only with FastScale’s patent-pending
technology can you generate lightweight, resource-efficient server
software stacks on-the-fly, dynamically provision in seconds to minutes
without a SAN or NAS, increase virtual server density by 3X or more, and
manage all software assets in an enterprise-class repository. FastScale
Composer Suite delivers the industry’s most advanced and dynamic
platform for managing constantly changing requirements while
significantly reducing day-to-day operating complexity and cost.
About FastScale Technology
FastScale Technology delivers an integrated family of 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.