FastScale Introduces Virtual Manager for VMware Environments

August 28, 2007; 02:41 AM
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--FastScale(TM) Technology, Inc., a provider of next generation software virtualization and provisioning solutions for enterprise data centers and Web farms, today announced the introduction of the FastScale Virtual Manager(TM), the latest addition to the company's flagship product, FastScale Composer(TM) Suite. Developed to extend the benefits of FastScale Composer Suite to virtualized environments, Virtual Manager supports the full line of VMware infrastructure products including VMware ESX Server, VMware Server and VMware Workstation. The combination of Virtual Manager and FastScale Composer Suite deliver a complete, dynamic and highly adaptive software solution for managing large-scale server infrastructure, both virtual and physical.

The new FastScale Virtual Manager is the only solution available that enables IT organizations to automatically build and streamline server software environments on-demand and provisions them to virtual machines in seconds - without manual effort of any kind. On average, server software environments are 99% smaller than traditional images, and they are built in only seconds. Because of the small memory footprint of the FastScale software environments deployed, benchmark tests of FastScale Virtual Manager have shown that 3X the number of virtual machines can run on a given physical machine without degrading performance. Moreover, scalability is dramatically enhanced with 40 FastScale virtual machines able to boot in less time than a single environment without Virtual Manager. These enhancements to virtual machine implementations deliver strong value to IT teams looking to further increase infrastructure utilization and flexibility.

"Virtual machine solutions have enabled us to significantly decrease data center costs by consolidating underutilized hardware. However, the growing use of VMs is now resulting in virtual server sprawl," said Sunny Azadeh, senior vice president of information technology at Agile Software. "FastScale Virtual Manager addresses this problem by offering a seamless approach to managing both physical and virtual resources, and it's the only solution that automatically streamlines the application environment being deployed to those servers. FastScale technology provides great cost savings potential."

Additionally, FastScale Virtual Manager delivers maximum hardware utilization by dynamically sizing a virtual machine disk image (VMDK) and its container to meet the precise requirements of the application environment. Not only is the software environment highly streamlined, but the VMDK and allocated resources are as well - all automatically, on-the-fly. Also automatic is the inclusion and configuration of the appropriate VMware tools in the VMDK. No other solution delivers the degree of automation and efficiency in managing virtual machine infrastructure that is available in the new Virtual Manager for FastScale Composer Suite.

FastScale Virtual Manager enables users to:

• Build & streamline software stacks automatically - to dramatically reduce system administration time, decrease manual errors and deliver more output from same physical resources.
• Create VMDKs with dynamically sized containers - for maximum use of hardware resources.
• Provision to virtual or physical machines on-the-fly - for optimal performance and load balancing.
• Run 3X+ more VMs per physical server without degrading performance - to enable increased server consolidation.
• Boot 40+ FastScale VMs in less time than a single traditional environment - for scalable, enterprise-class performance in a virtual machine infrastructure.
• Build and deploy virtual machines centrally - to fully eliminate virtual sprawl.

"Now that more enterprises are virtualizing their data center environments, systems administration and management is more complex than ever," said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale. "We are focused on eliminating the complexity through highly innovative technologies that address not only how server software is deployed in virtual environments, but also how it is built in the first place. No one else has tackled this problem."

Pricing and Availability

FastScale Virtual Manager is available on August 31, 2007. Pricing starts at $20,000. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit www.fastscale.com.

About FastScale Composer(TM) Suite

FastScale Composer Suite is an entirely new approach to managing software environments. Only with FastScale Composer is server software automatically streamlined by an average of 99%, built on-demand and then provisioned in seconds - eliminating the manually intensive process of building and managing golden images. Because FastScale software environments are so compact, the entire server infrastructure is a dynamic pool of compute resources, able to run any application at any time. FastScale Composer Suite is an elegant, scalable solution that reduces systems administration by 75% or more and enables overall server utilization to above 90%.

About FastScale Technology

FastScale Technology delivers a new generation of software virtualization and provisioning solutions for enterprise-class Web farms and data centers. Through its patent-pending technologies, FastScale enables IT organizations to build, manage and deploy complex and dynamic software environments with unparalleled simplicity, flexibility and security while achieving dramatic lifecycle cost savings and server utilization improvement. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, 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.