Cofio Software, headquartered in

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

, was a privately held software company founded in 2006 which produced a product called AIMstor. After being acquired in 2012 the product became known as the Hitachi Data Instance Director. and later became Hitachi Ops Center Protector

History

The Cofio founders were also founders of BakBone Software, with the majority of the Cofio's engineering team also being the core developers at BakBone. They were the team that created the re-designed NetVault Backup 6 product. The engineering team was based in the

South of England Southern England, or the South of England, also known as the South, is an area of England consisting of its southernmost part, with cultural, economic and political differences from the Midlands and the North. Officially, the area includes Gr ...

and worked together since the early 1990s. The company name ''Cofio'' is a

Welsh language Welsh ( or ) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically, it has ...

term meaning "to remember". The company developed data management storage management software. The product was branded and given the trademark AIMstor in 2008. Cofio was acquired by

Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was a provider of modular mid-range and high-end computer data storage systems, software and services. Its operations are now a part of Hitachi Vantara. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. and part of ...

(HDS) on September 21, 2012, and the AIMstor product was released as Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID). HDID orchestrates data protection technologies on HDS storage arrays. HDID workflow and policy management capabilities are being utilized for end-to-end data management.

Products

AIMstor

The concept of AIMstor was the prevailing reason Cofio Software was founded. The intention of the product was to provide data management functions such as backup, archiving, real-time replication, full recovery and

continuous data protection Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user ...

(True-CDP) under one platform. Rather than having many different products that are later integrated in a complex fashion, AIMstor was a workflow manager for other data protection and data management products. At the core of Cofio's attempt at providing consolidated features was a user interface that allows data policies and data movement to be defined graphically allowing complex topologies to be created quickly, and to help administrators see the workflow of the policy and the data. Another cited major component of AIMstor was the Repository. This aimed to provide a storage platform that could ingest live data to provide backup,

and data archiving. It performed

data deduplication In computing, data deduplication is a technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data. Successful implementation of the technique can improve storage utilization, which may in turn lower capital expenditure by reducing the overall amou ...

as well as possessing an indexing engine allowing for fast search of the repository content. Although AIMstor was a single product it was marketed as separate products such as AIMstor Backup, AIMstor Replication, AIMstor CDP,AIMstor CDP
etc. AIMstor supported Microsoft Windows and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

ViStor

ViStor is a software implementation of a

virtual tape library A virtual tape library (VTL) is a data storage virtualization technology used typically for backup and recovery purposes. A VTL presents a storage component (usually hard disk storage) as tape libraries or tape drives for use with existing backup ...

(VTL). It was released in 2007 to OEMs in Asia specifically who create VTL appliances using the ViStor software. The software runs on a version of

and supports the

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/I ...

protocol as well as

Emulex Emulex Corporation is a provider of computer network connectivity, monitoring and management hardware and software. The company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, are or w ...

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data c ...

host bus adapters. The product was no longer supported after the HDS acquisition.

References

{{reflist

External links

AIMstor SEPT-2008 Product Press Release

Cofio Official Website

AIMstor User Interface Video

Cofio Software Private Vendor Watchlist Profile

Software companies based in California Companies based in San Diego Software companies established in 2006 2006 establishments in California Defunct software companies of the United States