Arkeia presents at Tech Field Day 8

Arkeia Software presented at Tech Field Day 8 with a focus on the company’s background, data deduplication technology, and strategies for offsite data protection. Bill Evans, representing product management, outlined the company’s mid-market focus and discussed their innovations in virtualization and backup methodologies. A significant portion of the presentation was dedicated to explaining Arkeia’s approach to deduplication, particularly their unique technology called “progressive deduplication,” which is designed to reduce bandwidth and accelerate data movement offsite for cloud backup solutions.

Arkeia Software, founded in 1996, specializes in network backup solutions for both physical and virtual platforms. They deliver backup software and appliances and have built a strong presence in North America and Europe. Their product strategy emphasizes virtualization, with announcements about support for platforms like VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, and more. A major technological advancement discussed was Arkeia’s progressive deduplication, acquired from Kadena Systems. This method improves upon traditional fixed and variable block deduplication by allowing overlapping blocks of a fixed size, enabling higher compression rates and faster data processing. It includes on-the-fly hashing and progressive matching to minimize workload and avoid redundant data storage during incremental backups.

Throughout the presentation, Evans stressed the importance of deduplication in reducing cloud bandwidth usage, especially as mid-market companies look to replicate data to the cloud rather than rely on traditional tape-based offsite storage. He highlighted how deduplication improves storage efficiency across time, systems, and applications, particularly in virtualized environments. The discussion included the challenges and benefits of source-side vs. target-side deduplication and considerations about restore points, agent usage in backups, and risks like rogue administrators or malicious deletions. The session concluded with insights on when to use tape versus cloud solutions, noting that while cloud is viable for small data volumes, larger deployments often still require physical transport due to bandwidth constraints.