Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD), the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Cubist Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq:CBST) has selected and successfully deployed Riverbed’s Steelhead® WDS appliances across its globally distributed network. After evaluating competing alternatives, Cubist selected Riverbed® based on its ability to speed application and data transfers, delivering LAN-like application performance to remote users, while enabling consolidation of IT and replication of VMware virtual machine images to support its disaster recovery strategy.

Cubist Pharmaceuticals is a rapidly growing biopharmaceutical firm that focuses on the development of anti-infective drugs. Its flagship product, CUBICIN, was the first IV antibiotic developed from lipopeptides and is used in the treatment of complicated skin and skin structure infections, as well as other blood-stream infections. Headquartered in Lexington, MA, and with more than 400 employees worldwide, Cubist maintains an international presence with a manufacturing facility in Italy, global partnerships for distribution of CUBICIN and a U.S.-based sales force.

Supporting Global Application Performance

Cubist Pharmaceuticals had embraced a consolidated infrastructure model, but still needed to deliver applications globally while at the same time enabling VoIP and videoconferencing to their manufacturing facility located in Italy. With limited bandwidth overseas and the need to transfer large amounts of data from the location in Italy, Cubist wanted to avoid costly bandwidth upgrades without compromising application performance and future technology deployments.

“We had a couple of challenges with our location in Italy because of the amount of data that needed to be transferred on a daily and weekly basis, and the fact that we also wanted to be able to do video conferencing and VoIP across the link,” said Michael Geldart, senior manager of computer operations at Cubist. ”We got to a point where the link could not support the demands we were placing on it, and we needed to either upgrade that link or bring in some type of acceleration technology. Upping the bandwidth was a very expensive proposition, but Riverbed gave us a 15-35x application performance improvement – even with VoIP and video conferencing running on the link – and all without the costly bandwidth upgrade.”

Enabling Disaster Recovery for Business Continuity

At the same time, Cubist Pharmaceuticals needed to enhance its disaster recovery replication strategy for both compliance and business continuity. The company had established a disaster recovery facility in Philadelphia and was looking to replicate data from its Oracle ERP application on a nightly basis.

“We do replication of a number of different types of data. Major downloads of our sales data get replicated every day, and we also replicate our entire ERP and Oracle AERS environment, which is a compliance requirement for pharmaceutical companies,” said Geldart. “Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances accelerated our disaster recovery backups by 55x, enabling us to synchronize both a 240GB and 120GB database over a 1Mbps link in just 1.5 hours.”

To create additional disaster recovery resiliency, Cubist had also implemented VMware virtual server technology and was seeking to replicate the virtual machine images to the disaster recovery site. The company, which was an early adopter of VMware, now has roughly 90% of its Windows and Linux servers running inside of a VMware ESX server as a virtual machine, but it needed to have the ability to do a snap of these machines and quickly replicate them to other sites.

“The Steelhead appliances have given us unbelievable performance when replicating VMware,” said Geldart. “We now see upwards of 50 to 55x improvement in data transfer for a snap of a VMware machine, which is just incredible.”

Cubist has had Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances deployed globally for over one year now. According to Geldart, “In the one year I have had them deployed, the Steelhead appliances have paid for themselves in terms of eliminating the recurring bandwidth costs we would have paid, and will continue to pay for themselves over and over again.”