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Data storage specialist WD, formerly known as Western Digital, announced version 10.2 of its WD Arkeia network backup software, featuring scalability improvements to the Arkeia Progressive Deduplication technology.
The Arkeia network backup software is a user-friendly platform aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and is designed to ensure critical business data is backed up on both the local network and in the cloud.
The release, which became available the week of Feb. 3, is free to all Arkeia customers on current maintenance contracts. The new capability is available for all Arkeia backup servers, whether deployed as software, appliances or virtual appliances.
In addition, both software and appliances are bundled with one year of software updates and technical support.
The Arkeia professional range of solutions offer enterprise-class backup capabilities—features, platform support and Web-based interface—required by small businesses and are aimed at organizations that require high reliability, but have minimal resources for software installation and maintenance.
Models range from compact desktop devices to high-performance, field-upgradeable, rack-mounted units. With matched processor, memory and storage, coupled with an optimized Linux operating system, each appliance provides a tuned platform for Arkeia software.
“Backup solutions for businesses are going through a dramatic shift in technology,” Bill Evans, general manager of WD’s business storage solutions group, said in a statement. “Advances in data deduplication, hard drive capacity and wide-area network speeds allow companies to dispense with the error-prone process of trucking nightly backup tapes offsite.”
Progressive Deduplication is the company’s signature technology for making replication of backups to the cloud an affordable, tape-free alternative for offsite backup and recovery. Arkeia’s “seed and feed” technology allows the replication of large backup data sets to and from the cloud without the need for fast wide area network (WAN) connectivity.
Administrators first export backup datasets in encrypted form through USB 3.0 to portable hard drives or drive arrays, then ship the drives to a remote location where the backup sets are imported into another WD Arkeia backup server.
Meanwhile, smaller backup sets, such as daily incremental changes to the original large dataset, can be performed over the Web.
The company said the reclamation of orphaned deduplication blocks is a key capability for enterprise-grade deduplication solutions. No maintenance window has to be dedicated to the deduplication process and the largest deployments can affect block reclamation invisibly in the background, without administrator intervention.
Backup software pricing starts at $2,000 for a perpetual license for one backup server with unlimited file and folder backup agents. Backup appliance pricing starts at $3,490 with unlimited file and folder backup agents.
“WD Arkeia 10.2 extends WD’s hybrid cloud backup solution that offers the speed of LAN backups and the security of cloud storage,” Evans continued. “‘Seed and feed’ for overnight transport of large backup sets delivers the flexibility of rapid data recovery when needed.”