Outlook Series | FastScale Composer Extended

FastScale Composer Extended

August 29, 2007

FastScale Technology released the newest version of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite.

The new release builds on the company’s adaptive computing infrastructure with a range of features that help system administrators manage very large numbers of machines and software environments throughout the lifecycle.

With ease of use being a primary design consideration of FastScale Composer, system administrators stand to benefit from the automation of the labor-intensive, error-prone task of building and streamlining server software environments.

With FastScale Composer, software environments average 99% smaller than traditional software images, are built on-demand and are deployed to bare-metal servers – from start to finish in less than one minute. Combining flexible, rules-based mapping and automatic patch and configuration management, FastScale Composer Suite fully eliminates the golden image and the time-consuming process of building and managing it.

“With FastScale Composer Suite everything is completely automated. The full software stack is built, streamlined and provisioned in seconds,” said Steve Zoppi, managing partner of Collabri Group “Whether bringing a large number of new servers online or managing peak loads through rapid server re-purposing, the FastScale technology is an exceptional solution.”

Features in the new release include:

Increased richness and scalability of Web-based user interface (UI) – incorporating the latest AJAX technology; system administrators benefit from a more dynamic, responsive and interactive UI; a new folder management system and drop-down menus improve how administrators view and manage of large numbers of machines and software environments throughout the lifecycle.

Extensive, scriptable command line interface – enabling users to script workflows and integrate with existing processes in large organizations.

More robust reporting capabilities – offering pre-formatted reports for common system administration functions, eliminating the need to export data to a separate reporting engine.

Deeper hardware discovery – ensuring that when new servers are introduced into the network, they are automatically captured at a more granular level for more precise hardware driver mapping.

“This release is focused on large enterprises and the specific usability challenges they face,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale. “The enhancements we implemented in the newest version of FastScale Composer Suite target the needs of system administrators managing thousands of servers and a very dynamic infrastructure.”