Western Digital acquires storage company Arkeia

ANGALORE, INDIA: WD, a Western Digital company, expanded its storage product portfolio with the acquisition Arkeia Software, a privately-held data protection company based in Carlsbad, California, thus adding network backup software and appliances portfolio into its kitty.

The acquisition was completed through a merger transaction. Arkeia will be integrated into WD's Branded Products SMB unit and the products initially will retain the Arkeia name. WD will support all Arkeia customers on current maintenance and plans to retain both Arkeia's software and appliance product lines. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, says a release.

"Arkeia's products expand WD's growing product portfolio of solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's Branded and CE products. "SMB organizations are managing ever-growing volumes of critical business data, which need to be stored, shared, protected 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."

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

"Joining WD gives the Arkeia team a great opportunity to accelerate adoption of Arkeia's innovative technologies and products," said Bill Evans, senior director of worldwide software marketing at WD and former CEO of Arkeia Software. "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."

WD also announced that Arkeia Network Backup version 10.0 software, for which a limited release was delivered in December 2012, will be available now.

It enables hybrid cloud backups by allowing administrators to combine physical media and internet transport to replicate backup sets to or from remote cloud storage. Leveraging Arkeia's advanced Progressive Deduplication technology, Arkeia Network Backup v10.0 permits SMB organizations to protect large data volumes in the cloud without incurring high monthly bandwidth charges.

By allowing large backup sets to be moved on physical media and small backup sets to be sent over the wire, Arkeia makes it practical to replicate back-up sets from a LAN to remote cloud storage for an inexpensive, tape-free alternative to offsite backup and recovery.