Arkeia Network Backup Version 9. 1 Review

Arkeia Network Backup Version 9.1 Review

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ANB also supports numerous backup and disaster recovery methods, such as disk backup, tape drives, tape libraries, virtual tape libraries and cloud storage. One of ANB's best features is the ability to perform file-level restores your virtual machine image backups. Other backup solutions provide an image-level backup and restore solution or a file-level backup and restore solution, but not both interchangeably.

Arkeia Network Backup Version 9.1 Key Features

• Replication of Deduplicated Data Sets
• Web Dashboard
• Block Optimization
• Appliance Migration

Arkeia's latest Network Backup version (9.1) provides four new features that greatly improve progressive deduplication, increase backup status visibility, reclaim valuable disk space and automates the process of appliance migration.

ANB's replication of deduped backup sets, optimizes and reduces the amount of bandwidth required to replicate backup sets to your cloud storage provider. Version 9.1 is also multi-tenant, which means it allows a single server to act as the destination for backup sets from multiple source servers.

Arkeia supports numerous operating systems, including MacOS X, *BSD, HP-UX, AIX, all of the major Linux distros, Solaris VMware and Windows.

Arkeia has gone to great lengths in its block optimization algorithms for its latest ANB version. Backup sets often leave 'orphaned' blocks behind that will de-optimize deduplication efforts. ANB seeks out orphaned blocks, considers them and reclaims the space automatically. Also during the block optimization process, ANB discovers and removes multiple copies of blocks retained by race condition conflicts.

The new Web Dashboard provides a comprehensive at-a-glance status of your backups. You see how many completed successfully, how many partially completed, how many failed and how many aborted. You can configure and customize the dashboard to present the level of detail needed.

Arkeia designed a new appliance migration utility to automate the migration of backup configurations and backup sets from one physical appliance to another. This utility takes the pain out of upgrading or moving to a new appliance.

The ANB product applies to a range of business sizes and needs from remote offices up to multi-site Enterprise deployments.

Arkeia Backup Appliance

The Arkeia Backup Appliance (ABA) comes complete with ANB software, disk and an optional tape drive. The ABA has a remote management console so that you'll require no onsite support in remote or branch offices. Using replication, you can move data between remote offices or to a central data center.

You have a choice of six physical appliances ranging in capacity from 2TB up to 24TB onboard. Each system has a one-year warranty but you can purchase up to five years with the appliance.

Arkeia Virtual Appliance

The Arkeia Virtual Appliance (AVA) leverages existing virtual infrastructure and packs all of the physical appliance's core features into a virtual machine. Arkeia distributes the AVA in a single Open Virtualization Machine Format file so you can use it in any virtualized environment. The AVA can scale both horizontally and vertically.

You manage your virtual appliance(s) with the same centralized management interface as your physical devices. In fact, you're able to manage agents, physical appliances and virtual appliances from the same simple web interface.

Under Arkeia's Hood

You can configure ANB to use source-side, target-side or mixed deduplication. Source-side dedupe has the advantage of reducing the amount of data transferred over the network and subsequently stored on disk. Source-side dedupe also speeds up the backup process to shrink the ever-widening backup window.

The Central Management Server (CMS) is a service that typically runs on the same hardware as your backup server, although you can dedicate a system to CMS. You need only one CMS, instead of one for each branch or remote office because only control information passes across the WAN and not actual data.

Using Arkeia's disaster recovery capability, you can perform fast, bare-metal recovery on x86 and x86_64 systems.

Arkeia's command-line interface is perfect for scripting automated backups, gathering statuses or performing complex scripted tasks that include iteration or conditional logic.

Demo Video

The video is a general overview of Arkeia's Network Backup version 9 software. In this six-minute video, you'll learn how to use the web interface to create a Savepack (backup job), to selectively identify files to backup, to specify a backup type, schedule a backup and restore from a backup.

Bottom Line

The Arkeia Network Backup software is among the best I've seen in the past 15 years. Its web interface, command-line interface, extensive supported operating systems list, multiple options for deployment and bare metal recovery are a few of the reasons why ANB is a solid 9 out of 10.

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