Arkeia Software Delivers Industry's First Virtual Appliance For Backup

Arkeia Software, a worldwide provider of backup and disaster recovery software, today announces Arkeia Network Backup v8.0 which delivers the first true virtual appliance for backup that gives customers free choice of hardware. Version 8.0 extends Arkeia’s product family of physical backup appliances and software applications to address the rapidly-growing demand for virtual backup appliances. Arkeia Network Backup v8.0 also simplifies backups of virtualized server environments, protecting both traditional and virtual machine platforms with one consistent process and making backups more reliable.

Virtual Appliance Is Fully Interoperable with Existing Arkeia Software

“iFuzion has used Arkeia Network Backup as our primary backup solution for several years,” reports Danny Malouin, Director of Operations at iFuzion, a managed hosting service provider in Montreal, Canada. “A key feature of our platform is the ability to deploy and scale additional resources on the fly as business needs change. The Arkeia Virtual Appliance has the potential to simplify system provisioning and maintenance and lower our operational costs.”

“Arkeia’s delivery of a physical backup appliance in 2007 enabled organizations with remote or branch offices (ROBO) to deploy the Arkeia Network Backup suite with the convenience of an all-in-one appliance,” explains Bill Evans, Arkeia Software’s CEO. “At the time, Arkeia introduced a VMware-based virtual appliance to allow customers to evaluate the functionality of our physical appliances. Building on this successful track record, today we are delivering the full Arkeia Network Backup as a production-ready Virtual Appliance on the VMware platform. Our customers need the flexibility and cost-savings that virtual environments can provide and they demand a simple way to manage it all. Additionally, with Version 8 we are delighted that VMware’s ESX hypervisor becomes the 130th backup platform that we support.”

Central Management Addresses Virtual Machine Sprawl

“The trend towards server virtualization offers dramatic cost savings and flexibility gains,” said Brett Waldman, research analyst for IDC. “Equally important may be the benefits of virtual appliances, which simplify and accelerate the deployment of applications like Arkeia Network Backup. Virtual appliances offer the ease of deployment of physical appliances, with the flexibility of customer-selected hardware. With virtual appliances bringing down the cost of deploying servers, proliferation of virtual machines is sure to increase, a trend that IDC believes has already started to occur. This threat of virtual machine sprawl and the lack of integration with existing management tools today is an inhibitor to virtual appliance adoption. Arkeia attempts to solve this problem with its Central Management Server that can manage Arkeia Network Backup appliances."

Arkeia Network Backup v8.0

The Arkeia Virtual Appliance delivers Arkeia Network Backup as a system image for a VMware virtual machine and comes bundled with everything required to implement a robust backup solution, including licenses for a disk-based virtual tape library (VTL) and Arkeia Backup Agents. The Arkeia Virtual Appliance delivers all the functionality of Arkeia Network Backup v8.0 and interoperates with Arkeia Backup Agents and the Arkeia Backup Replication. The Arkeia Virtual Appliance can be deployed in both VMware ESX and ESXi virtual environments.

IT environments are becoming increasingly heterogeneous with a combination of virtual appliances, physical appliances, and traditional software. Because Arkeia deployment interfaces are consistent, agents require no modifications if backup servers are migrated across deployment modes. This allows companies to deploy backup servers in one mode today, and migrate to other deployment modes in the future. Similarly, backup sets can be replicated from any backup server deployment to an Arkeia Virtual Appliance or vice-versa.

The new Arkeia VMware ESX Agent is installed on an ESX hypervisor and allows backup of one or several virtual machines on that physical computer, regardless of the operating system or the application running in the virtual machines. The Arkeia VMware ESX Agent leverages the VMware ESX snapshot mechanism.

Other features in v8.0 include an enhanced graphical user interface, expanded reporting capabilities, simplified tape library management, wiki-based documentation, and delivery platform updates. Arkeia Network Backup v8.0 is currently in beta test, and is expected to become generally available in March, 2009. Pricing for the virtual appliance deployment with three bundled backup agents begins at USD$2,000.

About Arkeia Software

Arkeia Software delivers proven solutions for data backup and disaster recovery. The Arkeia Network Backup Suite was designed for both mid-sized organizations and multi-site enterprises and protects more than 100,000 networks for 7,000 customers in 70 countries. Arkeia software products are available on 130 Linux, Macintosh, Netware, UNIX, and Windows platforms and include file-agents, application-agents, database-agents, backup replication servers, and central management servers. The award-winning Arkeia Network Backup software is deployed in three modes: as a virtual appliance, a physical appliance, or a software application. Arkeia shipped the industry’s first network backup solutions for Linux in 1996 and is headquartered in San Diego, California.
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