WD, a Western Digital company, announced an expansion of its product portfolio addressing small- and medium-sized businesses with the addition of network backup software and appliances from Arkeia Software.

US-based Arkeia is a privately-held data protection company, recently acquired by WD. WD also announced the general availability of the Arkeia Network Backup version 10.0 software, for which a limited release was delivered in December 2012.

“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.

The acquisition was completed through a merger transaction, encompassing all of the employees, technology and products of Arkeia. 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.

“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.” – TradeArabia News Service