Centralized Configuration, Monitoring, and Control

The Riverbed Central Management Console simplifies the process of deploying, configuring, and managing Steelhead® appliances. With just a few clicks, administrators are in full control of their Steelhead appliance deployment. Configuring, updating, and monitoring Steelhead appliances happens all through one Web-based interface.

The CMC also provides visibility into how applications are performing across a WAN. Reporting metrics such as WAN traffic levels, application throughput performance, and TCP session flow characteristics can be displayed over configurable intervals of time going back to a full year. Variable reporting modes provide underlying application insight needed to help diagnose problems and maintain the control over your WAN application infrastructure.

Key Features & Benefits

Touchless Steelhead configuration

With the CMC, a new Steelhead appliance can be deployed with minimal administration. Steelhead appliances will automatically contact the CMC for configuration and operation information, and start accelerating applications immediately.

Flexible group management

The CMC's powerful grouping feature provides administrators with the flexibility of creating groups of Steelhead appliances based on geographical location, business function, or personal preference. Once groups have been created, an administrator can broadcast a configuration to a specific group or to multiple groups as desired.

Intuitive configuration profiles

The CMC provides an intuitive "configuration profile" method for managing configurations across an entire Steelhead appliance deployment. Profiles are a set of configuration values that may be created, edited, re-used from existing configurations, and applied to target Steelhead appliances. For example, a complex QoS rule set can be made part of a configuration profile and then applied in one step to a group of Steelheads.

Scheduled operations

The CMC provides a facility to schedule any Steelhead function or configuration. Software updates can be scheduled for after-hours, or optimization policies can be scheduled to take effect at a specific time.

Central configuration and image libraries

The CMC provides the capability to archive and install both configuration files and software images to and from distributed Steelhead appliances.

Appliance and network health monitoring

The CMC presents a centralized view of the health and status of a group or all Steelhead appliances. Each Steelhead appliance has its status reported by the CMC as healthy, degraded, or critical based on monitoring a number of health elements. Round-trip times and loss rates on links between Steelhead pairs are collected by the CMC to provide a high-level overview of general network health.

Central log retrieval

The CMC consolidates the viewing and retrieval of one or all Steelhead appliance logs in the network.

SNMP support

The CMC supports SNMP MIBs. IT departments can use SNMP to monitor Steelhead appliances through a 3rd party management system.

Aggregated performance reports

The CMC provides the ability to centrally view performance statistics for all Steelhead appliances network-wide, or from a specific group of Steelhead appliances. Global statistics also can be represented by QoS classes or applications (optimized and pass-through). View a sortable list of all appliances/groups and their individual performance stats or view graphed representations of all appliances or a group's aggregate performance.

Dynamic report generation

With a few clicks of a mouse, select ports/apps/appliances and generate performance reports spanning a configurable window of time up to 12 months in the past. Want to quickly see throughout performance for FTP and HTTP for the first week of last June? Select these two ports and the time interval to see the report almost instantaneously. Customized reports can be emailed regularly to one or more recipients, further simplifying management of large numbers of Steelhead appliances.

Customizable pages

Choose which statistics and group to display on both the Summary and Home Pages. The CMC allows per-statistic configuration, including trending interval and traffic direction, and even changing the text label representing the performance chart. Automatic port and application discovery facilitates the creation of insightful reports.

Specifications

Platform

• 1U Rack Mount Chassis

Number of Steelhead Appliances Managed

• CMC 8001: Up to 10 Steelhead appliances
• CMC 8002: Up to 25 Steelhead appliances
• CMC 8003: Up to 50 Steelhead appliances
• CMC 8004: Up to 100 Steelhead appliances
• CMC 8005: Up to 200 Steelhead appliances
• CMC 8006: Up to 500 Steelhead appliances