Eventually one of the myriad nirvana schemes that the industry produces to dam up server sprawl is gonna click. Maybe this is the one and web farms and data centers will bless its name.

FastScale Technology Inc, a baby start-up only 15 months old, has just gone GA with its first product, a thing called FastScale Composer Suite.

It's supposed to automate the process of streamlining server software, virtualizing the environment and provisioning the hardware in seconds, thereby increasing server utilization by more than 90% and decreasing systems administration by upwards of 75%.

Oh, God, let it be true, considering the norm in server utilization is a mere 5%-10% with 70% of IT budgets dedicated to fussing over the applications that run on them. That's $500-$3,000 a month in labor to maintain one application server.

FastScale claims to attack the root cause of this mess - which it diagnoses as software bloat - to wit, OS platforms, OS versions, libraries, scripts, updates, service packs and configurations - by fully automating the process of building highly streamlined server software on the front-end while dynamically deploying and seamlessly managing environments on the back-end, a problem that many a company has broken its horns on before.

One thing's for sure. It's convinced the answer is not to add more hardware. That's only a band-aid, as FastScale CEO Lynn LeBlanc calls it.

FastScale creates an image that is reportedly 99% smaller than traditional software images. It's transitory, built on-demand, and resides on the server only as long as the job lasts. Once run, the server is available for automatic re-provisioning with a new software environment in less than a minute.

FastScale's patent-pending architectural approach tries to discard complexity. For instance, it doesn't store the image, only the recipe for the image. There are no golden images, so-called, to build or maintain, reducing admin time by up to 80%.

While an operating system may support hundreds of thousands application, FastScale's Application Blueprint identifies the precise OS components that an application needs at execution. FastScale then builds a small full-featured software environment - limited to the software's dependencies - that is usually something along the lines of 1% the size of traditional software images.

This so-called Dynamic Software Bundle (DAB) is created on-demand when the job is supposed to be executed and so is supposed to include the latest patches and updates.

Given its small footprint, provisioning to bare metal servers takes seconds. The application stack - Red Hat and Centos to begin with - is small enough to run in memory, which means it supports diskless configurations, which increases reliability and reduces power and cooling.

That's it.

FastScale, which is working with VMware - and apparently it can get five times as many VMs than most people out of VMware ESX - says a bare metal server is provisioned with a custom configuration in under three minutes - including power on and self-test.

JIT provisioning enables improved server utilization.

Pricing starts at $30,000. The company figures it saves upwards of $1,000 per server on commercial provisioning software.

FastScale, still only 16 people, just got its first venture round, $6.5 million with ATA Ventures leading and Leapfrog Ventures and Hunt Ventures kicking in. Its folks come from IBM, Sun, SGI, Cadence and Scyld and it's put together an advisory board from Yahoo, VMware, Informatica, Adaptec, Synopsys and TiVo. It has no plans for a B round just yet.