First Products Under WD-Arkeia Collaboration for SMBs

By Corentin Béchade, Redactor, StorageNewsletter.com

After
the recent announcement of sTec acquisition and the evolving roadmap Western
Digital unveiled two weeks ago in Istanbul, the HDD maker is going
against SMBs with backup subsystems in an effort to diversify its customer base with the help of Arkeia.

In early 2013 Western Digital acquired Arkeia Software,
a French backup and software appliance company historically dedicated to data protection for SMBs.
The main motivation behind this deal was to enter this fast growing
but very competitive market where leaders are EMC, Symantec, IBM, HP and Quantum, according to IDC. Now WD is finally unveiling its first backup solutions
developed under the brand name WD-Arkeia.

For
the first product announcement under the new brand, the company decided
to update its whole backup appliances line. It introduced four
models (RA4300, RA4300T, RA5300, RA6300) replacing R320
and 620. Ranging from 24TB to 48TB of raw storage capacity, the top-of-the-line models also integrates an SSD (made by Intel) for rapid
indexation and research. These appliances come fully populated with WD Re 4TB HDDs but
half of the storage capacity is unusable until the purchase of an
additional license. In term of connectivity, there are 3 to 6 PCIe slots, 1GbE is standard, 10GBE, SAS and 8Gb FC being optional. Note also one model with integrated LTO-5 (not LTO-6?) tape drive.

Along
with these newly introduced 2U rackmount network backup appliances, some of the entry-market
previous gen models are still marketed for small business needs. The
R120, R120T, R220 and R220T comes with far lesser equipments but are an
entry doors to small businesses. These old ones just like the new
generation are loaded with Arkeia V10.1 software with cloud "seeding and feeding" and cloud recovery via portable disk for appliances, appliance on-boarding wizard, and source-side de-dupe for Mac OS X. The idea is to allows companies to move backups offsite via network replication rather than shipment of tapes.

These new products are the results of six months of work for Arkeia and Western Digital and will be available in early July at a price starting at $9,990 or €7,790.

With
this products release Western Digital enters its much needed phase of
diversification. In a recent interview Richard Rutledge, SVP and GM at
Western Digital told us that "WD is still focus storage and storage is still dominated by HDDs". Though it is true for the time being, the storage market is in
a middle of an important shift and this new product enters in a very
competitive and aggressive market. They’ll probably need more than this foot in this backup sector to keep the business going steady in the
current market state.