Arkeia first came to my attention from a Linux Journal advertisement. A visit to the website produced trial version that could be downloaded. They now have a free version for Linux with two free clients which should suit most home network situations. Basically, I was almost wrapped from the start.
Know Software, who produce Arkeia, has a host of Unix and Linux versions for Intel, Mac and Alpha hardware, as well as Novell Netware 4.11, and MS NT4 and MS Win9x. Unfortunately the promised OS/2 version failed to materialise and I really do think they missed a great market with not catering for MS Win3x/WFWG {:-).
Upfront, I like Arkeia. It works great, "when it works" and that is it's major problem - trying to work out what the problem is and how to fix it. It has copious docs that you can review but the usual problem of what term does this mob use to describe this problem applies.
My first problem was a library problem under Caldera OL1.3, This was eventually resolved by KnoX Software support advising me to use a prior version. That was a problem almost a year ago and things are a little better now. Frankly, if you have a problem setting stuff up, sometimes it seems easiest to just re-install to see if it can fix it.
I suspect Arkeia has a sequencing problem about what should be installed first, but this isn't easy to find in the docs. The online help is basically useless, except for general ideas. It doesn't actually mirror the docs in anyway.
It's next major problem is performance. A figure of 70MB on it's snazzy speed dial sounds great, until you realise we are talking 70MB/minute, not per sec. I havn't cracked the cause of this yet, but it is definitely not a performance limitation as multiple flows easily go higher.
Multiple flows is another nice thing about Arkeia. Each client can be backed up simultaneously rather than sequentially. You can also throttle the overall throughput if it is in danger of choking the server or the network. I think you can also set the number of simultaneous flows that it will deal with as well.
I'm quite happy to recommend Arkeia software to any clients.