EMC Acquires Privately-Held FastScale

EMC Corporation has acquired FastScale Technology, Inc., a privately-held, Santa Clara, California-based provider of software platforms and solutions for next generation enterprise IT – adding a new dimension to the EMC Ionix portfolio to dramatically increase the performance and scalability of private cloud infrastructures.

Designed from the ground up to accelerate the journey from physical to virtual to private cloud, with the addition of FastScale, the EMC Ionix portfolio will simplify end-to-end management and maximize the performance, density and efficiency of applications and software deployed on unified infrastructures.

The transaction is not expected to have a material impact to revenue or EPS for the full 2009 fiscal year.

The acquisition of FastScale extends EMC’s powerful EMC Ionix solutions for automating IT management across a unified infrastructure of storage, compute, network and virtualization resources, enabling customers to accelerate their transition from a physical to a virtualized data center to the private cloud and to maximize the value of their new enterprise IT architectures.

Leapfrogging traditional software provisioning and management approaches which focus purely on administrative gains, FastScale’s technology simplifies application and server stack management and optimizes deployment for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, providing significant footprint benefits that allow data centers to run up to three times more virtual machines without degrading performance. In addition FastScale’s technology decreases memory and disk usage by up to 75%, enabling some of the highest levels of tier-one application performance in the private cloud.

This announcement comes on the heels of an expanded business and technology alliance between EMC and VMware. Key to this expanded alliance, the companies announced a new reseller agreement whereby EMC is now a fully authorized reseller of VMware vCenter AppSpeed. This new solution, along with EMC’s virtualization services, will be offered through EMC Select as part of the EMC Ionix portfolio, enabling customers to have full management capabilities across their physical and virtual IT infrastructures.

Jay Mastaj, Vice President and General Manager of EMC Ionix Software Group, said: "Today’s acquisition of FastScale puts another stake in the ground built by our recently announced Ionix portfolio of automated IT management solutions for the private cloud. With FastScale, we not only give customers deeper management capabilities via FastScale’s unique application stack management and provisioning, but we also begin to help customers fundamentally change the way they approach compliance, security and configuration management in the private cloud. FastScale and its portfolio of products, intellectual property and talented employees will help us champion and expedite this transition of physical to virtual to private cloud infrastructures."

Given the complexity of hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures, a retrofit of existing solutions does not work for next generation data centers. Instead, such complicated infrastructures require management at a logical level by design. By addressing how server software built and not just how it is deployed, FastScale uniquely delivers a low cost, high efficiency infrastructure for managing dynamic computing in today’s complex data centers.

FastScale’s flagship product – FastScale Composer Suite – is a fully automated platform for building, optimizing, managing and deploying application environments in physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. The solution’s unique technology allows customers to streamline software stacks automatically, dynamically deploy logical servers to physical, virtual or cloud in seconds to minutes, manage patches and configurations via policies, increase virtual machine density and decrease memory requirements, and unify management of virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures.

                      FastScale Composer Suite

Lynn LeBlanc, Chief Executive Officer of FastScale Technology, said: "We are very excited to join EMC and help customers facilitate the evolution of managing their next-generation IT environments. The addition of our software stack management, optimization and provisioning technology to the EMC Ionix portfolio will help customers gain tremendous efficiencies and management flexibility across storage, server and network in physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. The acquisition by EMC will better enable us to drive FastScale technology through the EMC’s strong research and development, marketing and sales channels, helping to expedite this evolution in IT management."

As a result of the acquisition, FastScale will join EMC’s Ionix Software Group, reporting to Jay Mastaj.