WD frees self from TYRANNY of TAPE

WD has introduced an update of the deduplicating Arkeia Network Backup Appliance product range featuring more powerful CPUs, higher capacities and less dependence on tape.

Arkeia was bought by WD in January this year when its software was at the v10.0 level, and updated software, v10.1, is included in the backup appliance products.

These products offer backup and disaster recovery to small and medium enterprises. There are four rackmount models and they feature doubled internal disk capacities of 4TB WD RE drives configured with RAID 6, dual hex core Xeon processors, up to 96GB of memory, and integrated solid state drives (SSDs) on some models, to shorten backup time and accelerate data recovery.

Only one model has an integrated LTO5 tape drive, signalling less reliance on tape for backup; hardly surprising. The "seed and feed" network replication feature included with the v10.0 SW, is seemingly taking over from physically shipping tape drives to a remote site.

There are four models, each with a 2U enclosure:

• RA4300 - 6 x 4TB disk drives, 32GB DRAM
• RA4300T - 6 x 4TB disk drives, 32GB DRAM, LTO5 tape
• RA5300 - 12 x 3TB disk drives, 64GB DRAM, 360GB SSD
• RA6300 - 12 x 4TB drives, 96GB DRAM, 480GB SSD

The SDD can be used to store the catalogue index and, WD claims, can increase backup speeds by up to 50 per cent. These products have two or four 1GbitE interfaces with the 5300 and 6300 models optionally having faster 10GbitE or 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel interfaces.

The updated software has a wizard to speed appliance set-up. The existing lower-range appliances, the R120, R120T, R220 and R220T, all continue. "T" models include an LT04 tape drive. The R120s is a dual-core Atom-based machine while the R220s is quad-core Xeon box. They will run the v10.1 SW. The R320 and R620 models are, it appears, superseded.

The four new models will be available in July with prices starting at $9,990. ®