FastScale

Five months after its debut as a virtualization automation provider, startup FastScale has added a provisioning product it claims can substantially improve the footprint of both physical and virtual servers.

FastScale's main product, FastScale Composer, automates the building and provisioning of a full software stack, sometimes called a "golden image," which is used to configure multiple servers in large enterprise environments. "We provision a bare metal server in seconds and run it out of memory," says FastScale CEO Lynn LeBlanc, who cofounded FastScale with partners Richard Offer, now the VP of engineering, and Stevan Vlaovic, now chief scientist.

The startup claims to be faster and take up less space than other IT automation vendors with a server provisioning focus, including Symantec subsidiary Altiris, BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli, and Opsware (recently bought by HP). Specifically, FastScale claims to shrink traditional software images by an average of 99 percent and configure them on bare-metal servers in less than one minute.

Key to FastScale's value proposition is that it automatically sizes a server image to fit the physical space available.

FastScale's new product, FastScale Virtual Manager, applies the same provisioning and dynamic sizing principle to virtual environments. The software automatically sizes the virtual resources to consume only the physical or virtual space they actually require.