FastScale Technology today announced the introduction of FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 Enterprise Edition, a platform for building, optimizing, managing and deploying Windows and Red Hat Linux server software for physical, virtual and cloud-based environments.
FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 provides logical server infrastructure that enables system administrators to ‘build once, deploy anywhere' and dynamically supports provisioning to physical, virtual and cloud-based deployments on-demand, while providing a standards-based approach to managing server software throughout its lifecycle. FastScale's logical server approach enables administrators to plan, deploy, re-deploy, scale out, and manage server builds in hybrid environments without making changes to the software stack-delivering dynamic provisioning to the best resource for the job.
Incorporating FastScale's Application Blueprinting technology that automatically identifies application and deployment-specific dependencies, the process of creating and testing software stacks prior to deployment can be significantly reduced, according to the vendor. Users have the flexibility to build lightweight environments with "just enough operating system," or traditional software environments that have been optimized to meet site- or policy-specific requirements.
"In our version 2.3 we did ‘just enough OS' which is still a big strength of ours," Jerry McLeod vice president of marketing and business development, FastScale, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We can blueprint for a software application and give you just what you need for an OS-so a huge reduction in size which means it is inherently more secure, it is lighter weight, and less resources." However, he adds, the company realizes that organizations don't always want that for various reasons, for example, in the application development process. As a result in version 3.0, "There is now much more flexibility for different groups and how they want to use it and deploy it."
FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 Enterprise Edition includes Stack Optimization Tools, which enable lightweight server builds that are up to 95% smaller, more secure, with reduced memory, processor and disk usage. For standard server builds, visualization and stack optimization tools enable users to analyze servers by role-based OS profile and then optimize by package group, file type or directory hierarchy with dynamic size calculations that support the assessment.
Intelligent Stack Editor provides a graphical dashboard for configuration and customization of optimized logical servers, including complex multi-tiered applications; and configuration settings enable 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.
Fastscale's software repository centralizes version management, tracking, traceability, and reproducibility of software assets; and dynamic provisioning allows logical servers to be deployed on-demand to VMware Infrastructure, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or bare metal servers. For more information, go here.