Arkeia Software is in the
business of providing back up and disaster recovery solutions for
networked systems. The company's PR group reached out to me to see if I
wanted to learn more about what they were doing. I found out that they
currently offer agents for 200 different operating systems/platforms,
have products that work with some of the popular hypervisors and virtual
systems they support, have special adapters for popular database
management products and have many major customers that rely on the
Arkeia Backup products.
The discussion moved away from their products to some of the challenges of creating intelligent backup solutions. We also discussed that the same technology might be sold using several different titles. For example the very same replication technology might be presented as a backup product, a database replication product, a messaging replication product or even a file/filesystem/volume replication product. The only difference would be the special adapters on the front end and what sort of features would be required to provide storage and retrieval of data on the back end. If one looks at the Arkeia product portfolio, it is clear that the company has built their product in a very modular way that supports quite a number of different use cases.
If we stop and consider what would be necessary to offer products that fit in the backup/disaster recovery/replication markets, the following requirements appear.
- Front end agents — software that knows how to fit into every major client and server environment:
- Every major operating environment must be supported: Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac OS and even Mainframe operating systems must be on the list.
- The software must be able to deal with physical, virtual and cloud-based environments.
- This software agent technology must have the special knowledge of how to gather data from files, directories, storage volumes, database files, files managed by collaborative systems, and/or files managed by popular applications.
- This front end software must not only know how to gather and, later, replace all of these different types of data, it must also know how to compress, deduplicate and encrypt this data for transmission to the storage server.
Replication technology — software that understands how to send large amounts of data across a number of different types of networks in the most efficient way possible.
- For best performance, the software must be configurable to support slow speed or high speed media.
- It must also be able to deal with very long latency for satellite connections.
- It must also be able to deal with intermittent network connections and still get the job done.
Server software — the backup server must know how to fit into every major environment.
- Every major operating environment must be supported: Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac OS and even Mainframe operating systems must be on the list.
- The software must be able to deal with physical, virtual and cloud-based environments.
- This server software must understand compression, deduplication, and encryption technology.
- It must know how to manage a sophisticated database for data from files, directories, storage volumes, database files, files managed by collaborative systems, and/or files managed by popular applications.
- It must also know how to work with the replication technology to gather and, later, replace all of these different types of data.
- It must also provide detailed reporting of what has been stored, how long it took to gather the data, how long it has been sitting in the backup database and provide both a command line and graphical user interface.
We ran out of time before we had an opportunity to really explore Arkeia's products in detail. If their understanding of the challenges of developing a superior backup product can be used as a guide, the company's products are likely to be well designed and useful.