FastScale releases new version of its Composer Suite
FastScale released an updated version of its software virtualization solution, FastScale Composer Suite, that now includes Microsoft Windows support.
Follow @infoworldFastScale Technology announced the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite. FastScale Composer Suite automates the process of building, managing and deploying server software environments for enterprise class data centers and Web farms, whether the infrastructure is physical, virtual or both.
The new release adds a much anticipated and welcomed feature with the support of Windows Server 2003 environments. It also adds new capabilities in lightweight application provisioning, and delivers a range of scalability and usability enhancements.
New features include:
- New platform support – including deployment of Windows Server 2003 and RHEL 5.2 environments.
- Lightweight application provisioning – for just-in-time, virtualized deployment of modular, enterprise class applications, enabling increased infrastructure performance and stateless server configurations.
- Increased scalability & usability – with streamlined configuration settings, enhanced Web and command line interfaces, and easier navigation for large enterprise deployments.
The company said that its Composer Suite was designed specifically to eliminate the labor-intensive process of building and managing server software environments throughout the lifecycle. They claim that with FastScale Composer Suite, software environments average 95% smaller than traditional golden images, and they are built on-demand and deployed to bare-metal or virtual servers as quickly as within seconds to minutes.
FastScale Composer works by a patent-pending process called "Application Blueprinting" which identifies the precise operating system components an application requires to be fully functional. Operating systems support hundreds of thousands of applications and any given application uses a small subset of the total. FastScale identifies these requirements automatically. Then, using the Application Blueprint, FastScale Composer builds a small, full-featured software environment with only the precise software components that are required — a Dynamic Application Bundle or DAB.
I contacted FastScale to find out more about how these Dynamic Application Bundles (DABs) work and to find out more about the Application Blue Print functionality. Shrinking things down by 95% seemed like a fascinating idea, and perhaps something out of the future. So how does it work? A FastScale representative explained it to me like so.
