Riverbed Extends Scale For MSPs With CMC-VE

Riverbed Technology, an IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, has 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 virtualised version of the Central Management Console (CMC) appliance, which helps enterprises simplify the process of deploying, configuring and managing Steelhead appliances. The new capabilities of CMC-VE allow MSPs to reduce operational costs and flexibly allocate management licences 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.

Increased Scale: Multi-Tenant Platform

With CMC-VE, MSPs will be able to take advantage of the capabilities 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.

Flexible Licencing

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

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