Western Digital Expands Storage Portfolio with Arkeia Software Buy

Arkeia’s software, appliances and virtual appliances, sold through resellers and managed service providers, back up data to disk, tape and cloud storage.

Storage specialist and Western Digital subsidiary WD announced plans to broaden its small and midsize business storage portfolio through the acquisition of Arkeia Software, a privately held data protection company based in Carlsbad, Calif.

WD also announced that the Arkeia Network Backup version 10.0 software, for which a release candidate was delivered in December, became generally available. Network Backup v10.0 enables hybrid cloud backups by allowing administrators to combine physical media and Internet transport to replicate backup sets to or from remote cloud storage. The platform was designed for organizations that want to replicate backup sets offsite (such as at a remote office), or that want to provide cloud backup services.

In general, Arkeia’s software, appliances and virtual appliances, sold worldwide through resellers and managed service providers, back up data to disk, tape and cloud storage. The company’s Progressive Deduplication technology speeds hybrid-cloud backup by reducing the bandwidth necessary to replicate backup sets over wide area networks.

“Joining WD gives the Arkeia team a great opportunity to accelerate adoption of Arkeia’s innovative technologies and products,” former Arkeia CEO and WD’s senior director of worldwide software marketing Bill Evans said in a statement. “The Arkeia team is delighted to be a part of WD. WD has chosen an ideal moment to invest in this critical product category as backup-to-disk solutions accelerate their displacement of backup-to-tape. WD’s financial strength, engineering excellence and organizational discipline will take Arkeia’s products and customers to the next level.”

The acquisition was completed through a merger transaction, encompassing all of the employees, technology and products of Arkeia, and the company will be integrated into WD’s Branded Products SMB unit and the products initially will retain the Arkeia name. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Arkeia’s products expand WD’s growing product portfolio of solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses,” WD’s branded and CE products executive vice president and general manager Jim Welsh said in a statement. “SMB organizations are managing ever-growing volumes of critical business data, which need to be stored, shared and secured. Our easy-to-manage small storage server, WD Sentinel DX4000, provides backup and storage centralization capabilities for small businesses and workgroups, while Arkeia’s network backup software provides a more feature-rich data-protection solution for larger SMB customers.”

A September 2012 survey by Arkeia suggested shift in interest and acceptance of virtual backup, as 80 percent of respondents reported they are considering deployment of a backup server as a virtual appliance. Additional surveys conducted by Arkeia and others have shown that still larger fractions of midmarket IT shops continue to deploy at least some physical servers, requiring that their backup solution be able to protect both virtual and physical environments.