Western Digital Corporation announced an expansion of its product portfolio addressing small- and medium-sized businesses with the addition of network backup software and appliances from Arkeia(R) Software, Inc. Western Digital also announced that the Arkeia Network Backup version 10.0 software, for which a release candidate was delivered in Dec. 2012, becomes generally available. Arkeia Network Backup v10.0 enables hybrid cloud backups by allowing administrators to combine physical media and Internet transport to replicate backup sets to or from remote cloud storage.

Leveraging Arkeia's advanced Progressive Deduplication technology, Arkeia Network Backup v10.0 permits SMB organizations to protect large data volumes in the cloud without incurring high monthly bandwidth charges. By allowing large backup sets to be moved on physical media and small backup sets to be sent over the wire, Arkeia makes it practical to replicate backup sets from a LAN to remote cloud storage for an inexpensive, tape-free alternative to off-site backup and recovery.