Arkeia Makes Waves In Backup/Recovery

Vendors are always using innovative developments to differentiate themselves from their competition, but also to justify purchases of their products by cost-challenged IT buyers. CA, EMC, HP, IBM and Symantec all have well-recognized, well-respected and well-accepted products in the backup/recovery software space, but that hasn't prevented competitors from successfully challenging them.

For example, CommVault has taken a rightful leadership position in this market, especially given the $66.7 million in revenues in its recent quarter, as well as continued overall revenue growth despite the economic downturn. Atempo and BakBone are expanding their efforts, and we have previously covered two younger players, Acronis and Zmanda. Acronis, with its enhanced product suite, is now able to meet enterprise-class needs in addition to those of its traditional SMB clients. Zmanda has improved its open source backup solutions with a strong cloud backup offering.

Backup/recovery software is not all that is involved in this part of the data protection space. FalconStor, Quantum, SEPATON and Spectra Logic are among the companies that participate in this space, as well. Such a crowd does little to dissuade players like Arkeia Software from seeking to make waves. Arkeia has been around since 1996 and claims 7000 enterprise customers in 70 countries, including many whose names are highly recognizable.

Arkeia deploys its network backup software in three modes: physical appliance, virtual appliance and traditional software. Its software has sophisticated enterprise-class features, such as database agents (ex. DB2 and Oracle), application agents (for Exchange) and virtual machine agents (for VMware ESX). Arkeia needed more if it hoped to achieve its ambition of being listed among tier one vendors, and they believed that data deduplication is critical to that goal. Consequently, Arkeia bought Kadena Systems for the company's data deduplication technology.

Now why would one more data deduplication product make a difference? Almost all the other vendors mentioned in this article have their own, and, for the most part, they are quite capable products. Well, there are a number of ways to distinguish data deduplication, such as where the process is performed (source or target),when it is performed (inline or post-process, although some vendors argue the benefits of policy-based solutions), and granularity (fixed block or variable block).But while vendors argue about the benefits of various approaches, the space savings offered by all data deduplication technologies are similar. Space savings is the general theme underlying the marketing of such solutions. That is by no means a bad thing; in fact, saving space can affect everything from maximizing the value of storage investments to improving datacenter facilities efficiency. However, is space savings the only big benefit offered by data deduplication?

Arkeia Software would argue no. In a network backup scenario where data is backed up over a LAN or WAN, an important use case for many IT organizations is to reduce the time required for backup. Data deduplication can help achieve that goal, but only if it occurs at the source, where the data to be backed up resides, rather than at the target, where the backup copies are destined. Why? Because such solutions identify duplicate data at the source reduce the overall volume of data transmitted, speeding the backup process.

Guess where Arkeia Software performs its data deduplication? At the source. Guess where most of its competitors execute data deduplication? At the target. This gives an advantage to Arkeia in reducing backup time for the use cases the company is targeting.

Arkeia Software has just announced its acquisition of Kadena Systems for its data deduplication technology. Kadena had been focused on a targeted market in providing data deduplication for flash drives. Arkeia recognized that this technology could be repurposed for the backup/restore software market to reduce network traffic by only sending unique data segments, shortening the backup window.

Virtualized environments also have a number of issues for which data deduplication at the source is the right answer. So Arkeia Software may very well find that the Kadena deal has placed the company in the right place at the right time as the Kadena software can easily be used in a virtualized environment.
 
One of the defining characteristics of any data deduplication technology is its granularity, a factor in determining both the performance of a data deduplication algorithm and its ability to save space. Although file-level data deduplication has its place as single instancing, most data deduplication occurs at the sub-file level, notably at the fixed block or variable block levels. For a number of technical reasons, the variable block approach has tended to be the preferred method. Kadena developed a new approach using an adjustable block size, sliding window algorithm based on a "progressive-matching" strategy.Although this is very good for finding duplicate data, the knock is that it was too computationally intensive for practical use. Progressive matching greatly reduces the number of computationally intensive hash calculations historically required with sliding window algorithms, making sliding window deduplication highly efficient. Thus, in Kadena, Arkeia Software has acquired a patented technology that does not make it beholden upon any other intellectual property holders and that gives it great flexibility in how it develops, delivers and charges for data deduplication.

All in all, between its own technologies and those of Kadena Systems, Arkeia can now use data deduplication as a market differentiator rather than simply a "me, too" offering.

Critics might deride the chances of Arkeia Software and other smaller challengers in their ability to reach tier one status. The argument is that the well-entrenched players have large, installed bases for whom switching costs might be too high, while strong, existing go-to-market channels, brand name recognition and other points make competition difficult, at best.

All of this is true, and the critics may be right (although once-small CommVault has certainly earned the right to be called a tier one vendor in its particular space). However, as has been amply demonstrated by small companies, if a small company fulfills a need that the more established players are not able to address, they can become prominent players. It may face a difficult road ahead, but I think Arkeia Software has a chance for successfully reaching its tier one goal. The backup/restore software market space will continue to be fun to watch.