History 2004: Arkeia, Linux Backup Company

Arkeia is original in 2 ways:

1) along with Storix, it’s probably the only company to have written a professional enterprise backup software under Linux, while most products in the market are developed under Windows or Unix and then migrated for Linux,

2) it’s a US company of French origin. CEO Roussel even has 2 first names, Philippe in France, Phil in USA.

Initially with his own money and that of three other partners, the former co-founder of Newlog started Knox Software in 1990 in the Paris area, later renamed Arkeia with the idea of writing backup software under Linux. The operation took 3 years. The 1st version was offered as downloadable freeware in keeping with the Linux community’s customs.

The company now boasts nearly 100,000 users.

Of course, along the way, the product has been able to make a name for itself, and to offer a more professional, selling version that boasts 4,000 corporate customers throughout the world, half of them in USA.

At the end of 1996, the firm established a California office in Burlingame, subsequently transferred to Carlsbad, near San Diego, which then became the headquarters.

Roussel now believes that Arkeia Corp. is more American than French.

And yet, when he sought to strengthen his financial footing, he found investors in France more easily than in the States, and it was 2 French banks, Banque Populaire and Credit Lyonnais, who brought €3 million in June 2004.

Profitable since 1996, “except briefly in 2001,” Roussel interjects, the company counts 50 people WW (“That should double in 6 to 12 months“), and has announced sales of $4.5 million over the past 12 months.

Arkeia continues to sell software directly over the Internet, although if the customer needs support, it has had the option since 2001 of turning to a long list of VARs and resellers.

Main competitors: “BakBone, Veritas and CA,” in that order, according Roussel.

Of course, even if the software are written in Linux, they allow for backup in Windows, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and even Mac OS X machines, on most tape drives and libraries.

Over time, considerable improvements have been made on the 2 base products, which are Server Backup, introduced in January 2004 and sold for $290 for one Linux server and its auxiliary, Backup Disaster Recovery for $890, as well as Network Backup, billed from $490 to $800 for 3 to 8 computers.

With the latter, a typical configuration with tape autoloader protecting one NDMP NAS, one Solaris server and one Oracle Linux server runs approximately $5,000.

“Sales are from $3,000 to $5,000 on average per backup server,” says Roussel.

The most recent version of Network Backup includes NMDP support for NAS, Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) for snapshots on Windows 2003 and soon SPARC Solaris 10, as well as enhanced features like tape verification, stronger encryption and backup to disk.

Note also the release of a new plug-in for hot backup of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) servers, fairly rare, as well as others for Lotus, MSExchange, Oracle, DB2 and MySQL.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 201 on October 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.