Cofio Software

Cofio Software Incorporated

Type	Acquired
Industry	Computer software
Founded	2006
Headquarters	San Diego, California, USA
Key people	Tony Cerqueira, CEO , Fabrice Helliker CTO
Products	AIMstor
Revenue	Undisclosed
Slogan	"Simplicity of One."
Website	www.cofio.com

Cofio Software, headquartered in San Diego, California, was a privately held startup company founded in 2006 by Tony Cerqueira, Patrick Barcus and Fabrice Helliker. 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. The product was branded and given the trademark AIMstor in 2008. l

Cofio was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) on September 21, 2012, and the AIMstor product was released as Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID). HDID now orchestrates a variety of data protection technologies on the largest HDS storage arrays worldwide. HDID workflow and policy management capabililties 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 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. AIMstor is also a workflow manager for other data protection and data management products, software or hardware based, that, via API, can be driven by AIMstor policies and workflows in a centralized manner.

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, and to help administrators see the workflow of the policy and the data.

Another cited major component of AIMstor is the Repository. 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 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, AIMstor Replication, AIMstor CDP, 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".

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