Arkeia Acquires Kadena to Get De-Dupe

Arkeia Software, provider of fast, easy backup solutions, announced the acquisition of Kadena Systems, Inc., a provider of data deduplication technologies.

Arkeia will integrate proven deduplication technology to deliver source-side data deduplication in Arkeia Network Backup.  Source-side data deduplication accelerates backups, reduces network congestion and is ideal for virtualized environments which have heavily duplicated data.

Santa Clara-based Kadena Systems has developed unique block-grain, content-aware, sliding-window data deduplication technology. Because the size of the sliding window is adjustable based in the content type or ‘content aware’, Kadena can achieve both higher compression ratios and speeder deduplication. Since Kadena uses progressive-matching algorithms to identify known blocks, the speed of the deduplication process is greatly accelerated compared to first-generation approaches. The first Kadena patent was filed in 2004 and the technology has proven fast and reliable for more than 6,000 end-user customers.

Faster, Easier-to-Use,
More Affordable Backup Infrastructure
“Kadena Systems technology is next-generation data deduplication that is fast and efficient,” said Bill Evans, CEO of Arkeia Software. “For network backup applications, the primary benefit should be faster backups that allow a shorter backup window. Arkeia will make this possible by delivering source-side deduplication that minimizes network traffic required for backups. Because deduplication is seamlessly integrated, de-duplicated backups become easier to define and manage." Since backup servers integrate deduplication, administrators enjoy lower costs.”

                             Kadena Progressive Matching Technology

The Kadena deduplication technologies will be seamlessly integrated with Arkeia, minimizing complexity but also giving customers flexibility in the form of:

• deployment platforms – as software, appliances or virtual appliances, so customers can roll-out deduplication as their infrastructure requires it, ending the debate between software versus appliance deployment of data deduplication
• deduplication location – either at the source or at the target, so customers can optimize for network performance and backup speed
• scope of deduplication – either locally, remotely or globally, so customers can remove duplicate data from  source data pools of various scopes, permitting maximum  compression ratios and minimal network traffic

“Data deduplication at the source in backup processes is gaining adoption since it can enable greater end-to-end efficiency, such as faster backup. Network bandwidth, the bottleneck in network backup, can be significantly reduced because duplicate data does not traverse the network," said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “According to our research, customers are more concerned with efficiency, citing cost, ease of integration and use, and performance as top factors for selecting data data deduplication. The Arkeia-Kadena approach of offering deduplication as an integrated backup solution promises to address all of these top issues.”  

Source-side Deduplication in Virtualized Environments
Virtual servers are easy to deploy and are not directly constrained by the direct cost of hardware. As a result, virtual environments often suffer from over-provisioning of virtual servers – commonly known as ‘virtual server sprawl’. Dedicating an operating system to each application or each test environment causes significant redundant data. As a result, effective data deduplication can result in huge disk capacity reductions and vastly improved backup performance.

According to Gartner, virtual desktops will be popularized in 2010, and by 2013 spending on virtual desktop environments will reach $65.7 billion annually–nearly a 40 percent share of the overall desktop market. As virtual desktops become more prevalent, Systems Administrators will finally have the ability to backup these highly redundant desktops. In these environments, source-side data deduplication can deliver a dramatic reduction in requirements for storage and network bandwidth.

Source-side deduplication can be deployed within the guest OS or take advantage of hypervisor-specific storage APIs, such as VMware’s vStorage (VCB) and Microsoft Hyper VSS. If the virtual environment uses SAN storage, deduplicated backups of virtual environments will not have to traverse the LAN, resulting in speedier backups and shortened backup windows. In environments without SAN, System Administrators can further increase performance by deploying the Arkeia Virtual Appliance and limiting traffic to the within the VLAN.

Kadena Systems CTO, Tamir Ram Joins Arkeia
Tamir Ram, previously CTO at Kadena Systems, will join Arkeia Software as Chief Architect. Ram comes to Arkeia with deep technical expertise in storage including technical leadership roles at storage leaders VERITAS (now Symantec), NetFrame and Auspex Systems. Ram also served as the original engineering team leader at Data Domain. He has been awarded several patents in data protection and networking.