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

“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.