IT Pro Start-Up Tour: Arkeia

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Who are they?

To our mind, Arkeia isn't really a start-up; being founded 16 years ago surely counts against it.

However, it claims start-up status for two reasons: one, its fresh move into the virtual server backup market; two, that it recently integrated Kadena Systems’ "progressive deduplication" technology, having acquired the company in 2009.

Arkeia’s two biggest differentiators are its deduplication feature and its virtual server backup strengths

Start-up or not, Arkeia offers what it calls “fast, easy-to-use, affordable backup solutions,” which provide the portal through which data moves from a company and out to disk, tape or the cloud.

Its products can be purchased in three forms: physical appliance, virtual appliance and traditional software.

Arkeia doesn’t have a big presence in the UK, but claims more of a following in the US, France and Germany. Medium-sized businesses form its main target audience, although past customers include big hitters such as EA, Sony and Toshiba.

Why should you care?

Arkeia’s two biggest differentiators are its deduplication feature and its virtual server backup strengths, both folded into its flagship offering - Arkeia Network Backup.

The vendor is particularly proud of the Kadena deduplication offering, even though it is equally proud of being a company which develops its own technology rather than acquiring it. It’s another minor dichotomy in the firm’s outlook though, and IT directors should care more about what the technology does.

CEO Bill Evans, an unassuming, bespectacled middle aged gent, claims Kadena's offering is the industry’s best thanks to its “sliding window” technique, in which data blocks can come in different sizes for different file types and can overlap one another.

We’ve empirically tested six different block sizes on every known file type in the universe

“The compression is better because we are application-aware," said Evans. “We know what block size to use because we’ve empirically, with existing customers, tested six different block sizes on every known file type in the universe.”

Arkeia also allows for deduplication at the source, rather than after the move outside of the company data centre. This means data packets can be moved in and out of the business faster, Evans explained.

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