AIMstor
| Platform | Cross-platform |
|---|---|
| Type | Backup and recovery |
| License | proprietary |
| Website | http://www.cofio.com/AIMstor-Backup/ |
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 is defining two things, Policies and Data Flow. Policies define data classifications (type 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. Both Policy definition and Data Flow definition are done 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 machines 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 machine. The receiving machine may store it and / or forward it to another machine.
A departure to other products is that each core function was designed to work in conjunction with each other. This means that if data in a classification may only need to be picked up once regardless if there are several operations applied to it (backup, archiving, replication etc). The stated benefit of the architecture is 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