The words "quick and easy" don't typically come to mind when one thinks about data center deployment. But as more companies and organizations are building out data centers and consolidating servers, the need for simplification has probably never been greater.

Looking for a simpler way and something that is now on the GSA schedule, solution provider TVAR Solutions, based in McLean, Va., recently joined up as a partner with FastScale and is taking advantage of the company's just released FastScale Composer Suite 3.0 Enterprise Edition.

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While the new release is aimed both at commercial and other customers, TVAR found that the release opened doors with government customers.

"The new features help government customers who have strict certification requirements," says Toby Zellers, vice president of strategy and solutions at TVAR. "They may require certain bits of code be in the software stack. Now, the way stack optimization works, they can make sure those pieces of the stack are there."

FastScale Composer is a GUI-driven software platform for building, managing and deploying software stacks. The most recent version allows for deployment of custom stacks and not just a lightweight build enabled by previous versions, says Jerry McLeod, vice president of marketing and business development at FastScale. The software enables logical servers to be added and configured in the software stack and then deployed multiple times across environments including physical servers, virtual servers and in the cloud, he says.

"As a government reseller, having the custom configuration was very important," says Zellers. "It was a conversation piece with the previous version, and this question always came up." Zellers adds that FastScale was added to the GSA schedule in July.

FastScale is a relatively new and small company, currently working with just eight channel partners. McLeod notes that it is not just government customers that are interested in this kind of technology. With FastScale, he says, once a stack is set up it can be deployed over and over, and it can be edited and changed.

"Customers don't want to be told a deployment is going to take 20 days," McLeod says. "They want to be told it's 20 minutes."