AIMstor

Cofio AIMstor is a software product developed by Cofio Software. Cofio described the product as a Data management product ^[1] with a feature set particularly tailored to Backup, Replication and Archiving.^[2]

Product Philosophy

The premise behind AIMstor is that it provides a solution where the core functionality for all the key features (backup, replication, CDP, archiving) is part of the base install sharing common code and that different features may be chained together seamlessly. To understand the essence of AIMstor it is probably easier to understand how it strives to represent the method of defining a solution to the user.

The core of the configuration and the ethos of AIMstor definetwo things, Policies and Data Flow. Policies define data classifications (types of data) and the operations (backup, replication, CDP, etc.) that should be applied to those classifications.

Data Flow allows you to define physical topologies where you define where policies are assigned and how data flows through that topology. Policy and Data Flow are defined graphically.

Once the definition has been created, it is compiled into individual rules that are distributed to different machines in the topology. The rules define each machine's role in implementing the policies. The rules may hence define the source machine to collect data defined by the policies and forward it to a receiving machine. The receiving machine may store it and / or forward it to another machine.

A departure from other products is that core functions are designed to work with each other. This means that data in a classification need only be picked up once regardless of whether there are several operations applied to it (backup, archiving, replication etc.). The stated benefits of the architecture are that it reduces complexity because multiple operations can be defined in one policy and that it decreases the overhead.

Architecture

AIMstor has a distributed architecture where every machine is a Node. Each Node can serve one of several roles.

• Master – This is the central controller
• Data Source – This is a machine whose data needs to be managed
• Repository – This is a storage node accepts data. It has the capability of receiving real time or schedule data transfers. It has inbuilt indexing and data de-duplication.
• Mirror – This is a node that can receive mirrored data. It is used to replicate data from a Data Source.

Each environment will only have one AIMstor Master. The Master is responsible administrating an AIMstor system only and is not responsible for storing or transferring data directly.

Major Features of AIMstor

• Data Operations
  • Real time backup
  • Scheduled backup
  • Real time Data replication
  • Continuous data protection
• Repository Features
  • Data deduplication
  • Indexing
  • Snapshot
• Platform Support
  • Windows mix environments
  • Linux

See also

• List of backup software

References