Riverbed Virtualizing Central Management Console

Riverbed Technology introduced its Central Management Console – Virtual Edition (CMC-VE) designed for managed service providers (MSPs).

CMC-VE gives MSPs a multi-tenant solution to manage multiple sets of Steelhead appliance deployments, each dedicated to a discrete customer. As a result, MSPs can scale central management capabilities for their customers as they grow and easily bring on new customers – without purchasing and deploying new hardware.

CMC-VE is a virtualized version of the Central Management Console (CMC) appliance, which helps enterprises simplify the process of deploying, configuring and managing hundreds or even thousands of Steelhead appliances. The new capabilities of CMC-VE allow MSPs to reduce operational costs, improve visibility, easily scale and flexibly allocate management licenses to enterprise customers through its new multi-tenant capabilities. CMC-VE runs on VMWare ESX, and MSPs can run it on any existing server that has capacity.

"Our enterprise customers trust us to manage their network infrastructure, and WAN optimization is a critical component to our mutual success," said Jamey Hancock, Director of Channel Strategies for IPsoft, Inc., a global managed IT service provider. "We’re using CMC to manage our customers’ Steelhead appliance deployments in the easiest, most-efficient way possible. CMC-VE’s capabilities allow us to improve visibility across customers’ networks and provide valuable performance information, with greater flexibility and lower TCO for us and for them."

Managed WAN Optimization
Reducing Capex and Opex
Enterprises that deploy managed services often reduce both their capital and operating expenditures. By taking advantage of WAN optimization as a managed service, enterprises can optimize their bandwidth usage while simultaneously consolidating their IT infrastructure, which reduces their IT complexity and overhead.

Increased Scale: Multi-Tenant Platform
With CMC-VE, MSPs will be able to take advantage of the capabilities and efficiency of central management for Steelhead appliance deployments across multiple customers. The number of CMC-VE instances and Steelhead appliances that can be managed on a single physical server varies, and depends on each individual MSP’s environment. In one scenario, based on internal tests, one reasonably-sized server was able to run up to 50 CMC-VE instances, each of which was managing 50 Steelhead appliances. In another scenario, also based on internal tests, the same server hosted six CMC-VE instances, each managing 500 Steelhead appliances, meaning 3,000 appliances were being managed from one physical server.

Flexible Licensing
CMC-VE allows MSPs to allocate management licenses among customers as business needs change. Flexible licensing enables MSPs to purchase additional management licenses for Steelhead appliances as needed, and move existing license keys across CMC-VE instances. This gives MSPs a license pool that they can grow and allocate across customers as their needs change. Consequently, with CMC-VE, MSPs will be able to re-allocate licenses to a customer whose needs have grown faster than anticipated.

"The CMC-VE will allow us to deliver and manage application acceleration services to more enterprise customers, and multiple CMC-VE instances can be deployed on one server without additional hardware costs and operational requirements," said Wilfred Kwan, Chief Technology Officer, Pacnet. "Customers will also benefit from the added visibility into the performance of their service."

"By introducing a multi-tenant platform and flexible licensing, MSPs can manage thousands of Steelhead appliances across multiple customer sites – all from one physical server in their data center. In addition, CMC-VE can be deployed almost instantly when an MSP brings on a new customer – without having to deploy additional hardware," said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing, Riverbed. "CMC-VE allows us to address managed service provider needs by providing them with the flexibility and scalability to improve their service margins and reduce operational costs."

CMC-VE is expected to be generally available in October 2009.