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FastScale Technology

Stealth Enterprise Virtualization Software Start-up HotLink V Is Raising $10 Million

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An SEC filing reveals that HotLink V, a stealth enterprise software virtualization startup, has secured about $7 million from a $10 million funding round.

This is the company’s pitch on its website:

HotLink V Corporation, a venture capital backed company currently in stealth mode, is a Sunnyvale, CA based enterprise virtualization software start-up. Started in early 2010 by founders of FastScale Technology (acquired by EMC/VMware), HotLink V is focused on enabling seamless interoperability of all major enterprise virtualization platforms and public cloud providers.

Indeed, the filing lists FastScale founder & former CEO Lynn LeBlanc, former VP of Engineering Richard Offer and investor Mark Cameron White.

FastScale Introduces Stack Manager Workgroup Edition

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FastScale today announced the introduction of FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition, a new product that enables enterprise IT and engineering teams to easily create, optimize and manage logical servers for deployment in physical, virtual or cloud environments. Logical servers enable a ‘build once, deploy anywhere’ methodology to support complex, dynamic and hybrid server infrastructure and allow a consistent approach to creating and managing physical and virtual machines throughout server lifecycles. FastScale Stack Manager provides a central platform with a one-button solution for administrators who need dynamic yet optimized server builds.

FastScale Stack Manager incorporates patent-pending Application Blueprinting technology to automatically generate logical servers with ‘just enough operating system’ (JeOS) and deliver lightweight server builds that are up to 95% smaller, inherently more secure, with dramatically reduced memory, processor and disk usage. In addition, new visualization and stack optimization tools enable users to quickly and easily analyze servers with a full operating system profile and then optimize by package group, file type or directory hierarchy with dynamic size calculations that support the assessment.

The result can be compared to the FastScale Application Blueprint as an insurance policy against creating a server build with missing file dependencies – omitted files are easily added with a mouse click. Rich web based settings management allows policy-based standardization as well as fine-grained customization of logical server configurations.

In addition to the most automated, iterative and robust set of capabilities available to build and optimize logical servers for Windows, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based application environments, an enterprise-class software repository enables lifecycle management of logical server specifications, software assets, roles, permissions, history, and metadata for complete tracking, traceability and reproducibility. When a server deployment is needed, FastScale Stack Manager will create the appropriate output format on-demand from components stored in the repository, according to the logical server specification.

FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition is available now, and pricing starts at $25,000 for five users.

FastScale Lands $5.5 million Series B Financing

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FastScale Technology today announced that it has secured $5.5 million in a Series B funding round led by ATA Ventures and joined by prior investors Leapfrog Ventures, Hunt Ventures as well as a new strategic corporate investor. The company’s last round of financing occurred in late 2006, shortly before the launch of their flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite.

FastScale’s technology enables data centers to respond to constantly changing business requirements, server workloads, and server hardware with a server software platform that dramatically increases agility while significantly reducing day-to-day operating complexity and cost – whether the data center is virtualized, not virtualized or a hybrid of the two. The ground-breaking technology is the only solution on the market to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying heterogeneous server software environments with compact software environments built on-demand, automatic patch and configuration management, lightweight provisioning in only seconds, and an enterprise-class repository for lifecycle management.

FastScale software environments average 95% smaller than traditional images, dramatically decrease memory requirements, and increase virtual server density by 300% or more. With FastScale’s solution, the entire server infrastructure, both physical and virtual, is a dynamic pool of resources able to adapt to constantly changing demands.

“FastScale’s approach to the growing issue of software complexity is breakthrough technology for data centers,” said Hatch Graham, managing director at ATA Ventures. “The technology provides an elegant way for enterprises to manage the complexity while increasing server consolidation and decreasing cost. We’ve seen what FastScale has done for customers, and it’s impressive. We look forward to working with the FastScale team to help drive the next stage of company growth.”

FastScale Ships New Release of Composer Suite, Adds Windows and RHEL 5.2 Support

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FastScale Technology today announced (PDF) the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite, which it claims to be the only technology on the market today to fully automate 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 support for Windows Server 2003 environments, new capabilities in lightweight application provisioning, and delivers a range of scalability and usability enhancements.

The new features in detail:

  • 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.

FastScale Composer Suite with support for Windows is available now. Pricing starts at $30,000.