Cofio Software

Cofio Software, headquartered in San Diego, California, was a privately held startup company founded in 2006^[1][2] by Tony Cerqueira,^[3] Patrick Barcus and Fabrice Helliker.^[4] The founders were also founders of BakBone Software and much of Cofio's engineering team were the core developers at BakBone and were the team that created the re-designed NetVault Backup 6 product. The engineering team is based in the South of England in UK and have been working together since the early 1990s.

The company was formed in response to the need for a single view data management storage manager that could accommodate multiple storage and data protection solutions, and provide easy and agile policy management with use case flexibility.^[5] The product was branded and given the trademark AIMstor^[6] in 2008. ^[7] l^[8][9]

Cofio was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems September 21, 2012, ^[10] and the AIMstor product was released as Hitachi Data Instance Manager (HDIM) in April, 2013. HDIM now boasts connectivity and full support for a growing number of HDS storage products, including Hitachi Content Platform, HCP, for Exchange email archive and Windows file archive. HDIM policy management capabililties are being utilized for end-to-end data management.

• Click here to go to the HDS Web Page for HDIM

Products

AIMstor

The concept of AIMstor was the prevailing reason Cofio Software was founded. The intention of the product is to provide the ability to perform many of the data management functions such as Backup, Archiving, Real Time Replication, Bare Metal Recovery and Continuous Data Protection (True-CDP) under one platform. The key difference to competitive products is rather than having many different products that are later integrated in a complex fashion, Cofio's goal was to provide a single footprint application where the different solutions can be unified together in a seamless fashion to reduce complexity, hardware costs and administrative burden.

At the core of Cofio's attempt at providing consolidated features is a user interface that allows data policies and data movement to be defined graphically allowing complex topologies to be created quickly.

Another cited major component of AIMstor is the Repository.^[11] This aims to provide a storage platform that can ingest live data to provide backup, Continuous Data Protection and data Archiving. It performs Data deduplication^[12] as well as possessing an indexing engine allowing for fast search of the repository content.

Although AIMstor is a single product it is marketed as separate products such as AIMstor Backup,^[13] AIMstor Replication,^[14] AIMstor CDP,^[15] etc.

AIMstor supports Microsoft Windows and Linux.

ViStor

ViStor is a software implementation of a Virtual Tape Library (VTL). It was released in 2007 to OEM's in Asia specifically who create VTL appliances using the ViStor software. Software runs on a version of Linux and supports the iSCSI protocol as well supporting Emulex Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. This product was EOL after the HDS acquisition.

Trivia

The company name Cofio is a Welsh term meaning "To Remember".

References

External links

• Crunchbase Profile
• AIMstor SEPT-2008 Product Press Release
• CRN News Article on HDS Acquisition
• Cofio Official Website
• AIMstor User Interface Video
• Cofio Software Private Vendor Watchlist Profile
• AIMstor 2.3 Release