FastScale launches channel program 14 July, 2008 By Chris Talbot

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Although FastScale has worked with channel partners since it launched its first products in 2007, the company's North America Channel Program marks an expansion of its channel strategy. FastScale signed eight partners to the program at launch, but that's just the beginning; the company has plans to expand its channel presence outside of the major U.S. cities to other U.S. areas, as well as Canada, said Jerry McLeod, vice president of business development at FastScale.

"Because we're an innovative company, we're looking for the innovators," McLeod said when asked what FastScale looks for in a partner.

Ideally, FastScale partners have expertise in consolidation and virtualization, as well as good technical resources to support that business. McLeod described partners as leading-edge people with leading-edge technology.

Partners are fundamental to the success of FastScale and its products because they educate customers and know their customers needs, McLeod said.

"They know the people. They know the environment. They're working inside of the infrastructure," he said.

Their customers are deploying virtual machines today, and the channel has the opportunity to take FastScale's products to that market. FastScale's technology aids in server virtualization by reducing the number of very big golden images to deploy and manage, McLeod explained. Traditionally, businesses have very big images that they need to manage, and it can take hours to deploy them on physical or virtual machines.

FastScale's technology eliminates what McLeod called "bloated images" by only installing what's needed from the operating systems and drivers on the servers, although the servers can still access the entire OS or applications when necessary. Machines only need a portion of the OS and drivers, so by only deploying what's necessary on specific machines, it reduces the amount of space required, thereby saving customers money, he said.

"We never build up the big gold images. We never manage it," he said. Because of that, images can be deployed in seconds via a virtual machine instead of hours, he added.

Typically, FastScale technology is deployed in mid-range and enterprise environments. It's aimed at businesses with at least 50 servers that want to be more dynamic and save time and money, but some deployments run into several thousand servers, he said.