Arkeia Software provides worldwide network backup solutions for both physical and virtual environments. Arkeia Software is a private company that was founded in 1996 by three French engineers and is currently based in Carlsbad, California. The company has 50 employees. The company’s backup software is made available as a software application, a physical appliance or virtual appliance.

Originally named Knox Software, the company was founded in 1996 by three French engineers, Michel Colzi, Nordine Kherif, and Arnaud Spicht together with CEO Phil Roussel.^[1] Though first incorporated in San Jose, California, the company was reincorporated in France upon receiving a $4M Series-A investment in 2004 from SPEF Ventures (Banque Populaire) and Crédit Agricole Private Equity.^[2] This was followed by a $3M Series-B investment by the same investors in 2007.^[3]

Licenses for Arkeia products have generally been "for fee" licenses. However, beginning in 1998, Arkeia has made available a limited-capability free version. The first free version, Arkeia Light, supported two clients with backup to a single tape drive and was available from 1998 to 2003.^[4]

Reviewing Arkeia Smart Backup (introduced in 2005 and available until 2007) in Linux User and Developer Magazine, Martin Howse said: “Smart Backup consolidates a more confusing former product range, with a basic product, priced according to the amount of backed up data, and relying on a plugin architecture for more complex integration scenarios.”^[5]

In a review of Arkeia Network Backup software in Linux Magazine, Jason Tower said: “All in all, there’s a lot to like about Arkeia...Performance was very good…Overall, Arkeia is a solid performer that treats Linux like the champion it is, rather than a second rate operating system supported only as an afterthought.”^[6]

Reviewing Arkeia’s Network Backup 6.0, Linux Format Magazine said: "Several major enhancements make their debut in this release. Most notably, support for local area network free storage area network (SAN) backups has been added – a major selling point given how inexpensive SAN devices have become. Also available for the first time is an integrated virtual tape library (VTL), which allows for backups to disk areas configured to the same size as tapes.”^[7]

In 2009 Arkeia released Arkeia Network Backup 8 which delivers Arkeia Network Backup as a system image for VMware virtual machines and comes bundled with everything needed to implement a backup solution, including licenses for a disk-based virtual tape library (VTL) and Arkeia Backup Agents. The Arkeia Virtual Appliance can be deployed in both VMware ESX and ESXi virtual environments.^[8]

In 2009 Arkeia acquired intellectual property and engineering resources from Kadena Systems in a deal that added source-based data deduplication to Arkeia’s Network Backup software. The Kadena technology uses a sliding window approach to identify duplicate data which checks the data stream one byte at a time until it finds blocks that match what the application has seen before. This approach keeps hashing calculations to a minimum.^[9]

Arkeia released Arkeia Network Backup version 8 in the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS repository as a no-cost, small-network package exclusively for Ubuntu users in 2009. One free license of Arkeia Network Backup Enterprise Edition for Ubuntu is granted per individual or company. The enterprise license includes one backup server running on Ubuntu, up to 250GB capacity for backup to disk, support of any single drive, tape or disk. It also features two client agents to back up many types of client machines including Windows workstations and desktops, and the vast majority of Linux machines, Mac OS X and BSD computers.^[10]

Arkeia said that in internal tests using VMDK files the company achieved a 38% improvement in dedupe ratios compared to "one of the leading deduplication vendors". Arkeia claims that its approach is more content-aware than existing approaches. Arkeia Network Backup 9.0 software automatically adjusts block sizes based on file type in order to maximize dedupe ratios.^[11]

Arkeia announced its EdgeFort product at Storage Networking World (SNW) in 2007. EdgeFort is an appliance allows backup administrators to remotely manage backup operations at remote sites without sending data back to headquarters over the WAN.^[12]

Jerome Wendt commented on Arkeia’s Edgefort appliance: “...what makes this product worth a deeper look is that it also includes a policy engine that allows one site to set up policies that can be applied universally to all sites or just one specific site…This allows companies to create a template of global and/or site specific policies and apply and update them when needed but leave the more burdensome and time consuming daily administration tasks of monitoring and handling daily backups to the designated administrator at each local site.^[13]

Storage Magazine, in its 2008 review of the EdgeFort 100 appliance, concluded that: “The EdgeFort delivers a smart D2D2T solution that is easy to deploy, and offers an impressive selection of backup and restoration features. Its extensive client support makes it well suited to a range of environments and it is offered at a competitive price as well.”^[14]