FastScale Technology today introduced its FastScale Stack Manager Workgroup Edition for building, provisioning, and monitoring cloud servers and physical servers.

The product is designed to generate logical servers that are as light weight as possible, delivering what the company calls "just enough operating system (JeOS)".

"With the small footprint, machines can be deployed, according to the logical server specification, in seconds to minutes to either in-house physical or virtual resources or an external cloud as traffic increases," Jerry McLeod vice president of marketing at FastScale Technology told InternetNews.com in an e-mail.

In addition, the application tracks software assets with a software repository feature, identifies the components needed for new servers with an application blueprint feature, an intelligent stack editor to ease the building of applications, and delivers a wide variety of dashboards and configuration settings (see screen shot) to ease management and enforce company policies.

The product currently supports VMware and Amazon EC2 clouds as well as physical servers (Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and bare metal servers, with compatibility with more virtual and cloud environments planned for the future.

Virtual servers can be delivered in VMDK, AMI, or disk image formats.

Price at launch is $20,000 for five users. The product is available now.

"Addressing the complexity and diversity of next generation data centers requires platforms and tools that readily abstract the logical design from the physical deployment. Otherwise, management, time and cost become prohibitive," said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of FastScale Technology in a statement. "Over fifty customers from a range of industries participated in our beta cycle for FastScale Stack Manager, and we consistently heard that this new platform delivers a new class of automation for optimizing and managing complex software in a dynamic, multi-platform data center."