Aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, the WD Arkeia RA4300 backup appliance is an integrated package including all hardware, software and storage. Delivered ready for use, it is compatible with more than 200 real and virtual platforms.

Arkeia, acquired by Western Digital in 2012, is a recognized specialist in corporate backup. The RA4300 appliance is a mid-range model “all in one” unit with integrated hardware, software and storage that can operate in standalone mode once configured. In the evaluated model, this appliance has 6 slots for disks, all with 4 TB drives for a total storage of 24 TB. This space can be configured in RAID 6 to favor security. In this case, up to two drives may be inoperative without risk for the data.

Full hypervisor compatibility
The appliance is compatible with the four major virtualization platforms: VMware
vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen Server and Red Hat RHEV. On the client side, more than 200 environments are supported. This compatibility does not extend so far to all functions in a disaster recovery framework, since Windows 2000 platforms are no longer covered. Like many of his peers, this appliance contains a sophisticated deduplication mechanism to reduce the volume of data in transit and stored. This progressive deduplication acts on the source side and has a granularity down to the data block. With the benefit of saving time and reduced disk footprint. This helps to maximize the storage space that is, once the data is de-duplicated and compressed, to the storage space multiplied by a factor 2 to 5.

A scalable appliance
The WD Backup Arkeia backup environment is simple to use. All of the actions outlined in the tree (configure, back up, replicate, restore etc). and setting takes place without major difficulties. As with any use of this type, the administrator in charge of deployment needs to know on the fingertips of his company’s infrastructure. The dashboard displays on a single screen disk space and its distribution, “health status” backup (successful or had problems) and the table of current tasks. Note that the backup application, WD Backup Server is also available off appliance. RA4300 The appliance can be configured as a bare metal disaster recovery unit. The DR Arkeia software agent that relies on snapshots VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) containing all the information stored on volumes (data, metadata, ACLs) and takes into account the partitions, volumes and native filesystems. An ISO image based on Windows PE 3.1 can be generated. We welcome the effort to maintain a WD Arkeia documentation space and a very complete and updated wiki, including recent patches against the OpenSSL heartbleed bug. The one-year warranty includes maintenance and covers hardware, software updates and support. Configurable and expandable at will, the WD Arkeia RA4300 provides a solid and well-integrated offering that provides a level of benefits without hidden costs nor surprises.