We are pleased to announce that Parkwalk Funds have made a follow-on investment into Akivum.
Arkivum has developed a safe and simple process to manage data security and safety. The process has the highest integrity to ensure information remains in bit-perfect condition all the time. The company uses an industry leading, energy efficient and proven storage technology utilising open standards to deliver fast and efficient online access to data.
The Company
Founded in early 2011, Arkivum was formed as a spin-out from the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre which has a world-class reputation in the field of digital preservation and has been working, for over a decade, with public and private sector organisations across Europe, to develop best practice for the safe keeping of digital data over the long term. The company currently employs 10 people.
Arkivum’s on-going links to IT Innovation means the company has direct access to state-of-the-art research that helps Arkivum meet its commitments to customers. This is complemented by a team at Arkivum that brings strong software skills together with in-depth experience in data centre operations and robust and reliable storage system implementation.
Arkivum’s offering is quite different to products in the generic cloud storage market where service levels and pricing models do not match archive customer needs. Arkivum’s use of escrow is unique and difficult for existing disk–‐based storage providers to implement and Arkivum’s software provides a simple and reliable way to integrate the archive into existing IT infrastructure.
The Technology
Arkivum uses the A-Stor software to create an advanced cloud-based Archive-as-a-Service offering. The A-Stor software enables Arkivum to provide a cloud archiving solution that can scale to multiple petabytes with long-term guarantees of service along with cost, feature and usability advantages over existing competing data archiving alternatives.
The A-Stor software was developed by the University of Southampton in a £3.3M Technology Strategy Board (TSB) project called Avatar-m which was collaboration with Xyratex, BBC, the University of Edinburgh and Ovation Data Services.
The University of Southampton has spent £0.7m and 10 man years over a 3-year period developing a beta release of the software that was demonstrated on a Xyratex hardware platform at IBC in Amsterdam in September ’09, and at the BBC.
Xyratex is a world leader in providing enterprise data storage solutions and Ovation Data Services is a specialist in the storage and replication of data for the oil and gas industries.
The Opportunity
The total global revenue generated by the storage systems hardware, software and services customer sectors is currently around $75 billion and growing with a CAGR of approximately 5% (Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems 2010-2014 Interim Forecast, IDC).
The “Enterprise Storage Systems” segment that Arkivum will operate in is currently worth approximately $27 billion in annual revenue, and is growing at around the same rate. This estimate is corroborated by IDC’s finding that the “worldwide storage service market” was worth nearly $27 billion in 2010, exclusive of hardware and software sales.
