Cofio Software Active Information Management

IPC Logistics struggled for 2 years using Cofio competitors BackupExec (Symantec™) for backup and DoubleTake (Vision Solutions™) for replication of their client critical data. In February 2011, IPC downloaded AIMstor in an effort to unify their Backup, CDP and Replication requirements with a single application.

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AIMstor performed "as advertised" from day-1. After virtualizing their entire server infrastructure in early 2011, IPC standardized on AIMstor for all their critical uptime data protection and disaster recovery requirements. Serving up 7 million records per day to aviation logistics customers, IPC demands the highest in recovery and restorability, maintaining 99.99% per year uptime with AIMstor.

"Not only do we protect all our VMs with AIMstor, but when we wanted to move our highly critical Citrix server from an old physical machine to a VM on new Dell hardware, we were able to execute a dissimilar Bare Metal Restore from a standard backup and avoid a normal system rebuild." Heather Smith, Network Administrator, IPC Logistics.

"AIMstor provides us with realtime protection on every level, and is hands down the fastest recovery we have seen. We downloaded it, installed it and had backup, CDP and replication up and running in a few minutes. It is simply easier to test, faster to implement, and far more reliable than anything we have used. Unified and real-time is the optimal way to go." Pete Musacchio, President of Operations, IPC Logistics.

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Calpine is a $7 billion energy company with offices across the entire US, specializing in geothermal and natural gas development. Calpine called Cofio to propose a 54 site scheme for unified business continuity that would include Real-Time Replication, File Versioning and CDP.

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Mirroring paired sites into 27 coupled sets, Calpine wished to utilize common file servers as both Source and Target for CDP data, File Version data, and live Replication data. Within a few minutes of our first web meeting, a Cofio representative was able to install and setup the required policies on 2 pairs of evaluation servers at the Calpine data center. Cofio competed against both DoubleTake and CommVault, winning the deal.

Some key benefits of the AIMstor solution for Calpine:

1. Real-time capture of all file versions;
2. 1 minute RPO of any file using CDP;
3. Any retention time of any file desired;
4. Live mirrored copy of any file on each paired server set;
5. Zero investment in added hardware.

Calpine is an innovator in the energy IT field, so their use of AIMstor as a flexible toolset to solve multiple needs with a single solution, and do it far below budget is a testament to their resolve to pass operational savings onto their customers.

Burkhart Dental has been providing supplies to dentists around the country for over a century, and they have different challenges today. To improve protection between central and remote offices, Burkhart sought out a product capable of handling real-time backup of their SQL database data, with application consistent recovery.

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Another problem they needed to overcome was to reduce the impact to their WAN lines, which were normally overburdened by backups. Using the Smart-Remote-Sync feature available within AIMstor, Burkhart handles backups from Remote Offices without worry or drama.

"Transferring backup and recovery data between sites has been problematic for Burkhart and spending more dollars for increased bandwidth due to inefficient backup products isn't an option. With AIMstor v2.5 we can move data between sites with existing bandwidth and save valuable computer time and disk resources", noted Bryce Kerker, of Burkhart Dental's IT group.

Beijing Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau (Beijing CIQ) has over 500 users in 5 different sites in Beijing with a typical problem: Due to limitations of line speeds throughout their network and the public networks they accessed via VPN, Beijing CIQ needed something that could manage slow line speed transmissions and ...

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still produce good snapshots for recovery, and then manage certain files for version and archive. Having reviewed many different products, they selected AIMstor from Cofio.

AIMstor is used to backup and version files from all branch offices throughout Beijing. The central authority manages all backup and archive policies, then pushes it out to user desktops at locations connected via WAN or public network VPN. Beijing CIQ workers can now either recover files and folders, and easily search for specific files based on a wide range of search criteria from the central AIMstor Repository.

The following are the key point they choose AIMSTOR:

1. Distributed architecture: All clients are self-aware of their policies, but centrally controlled and managed.
2. Byte-Level changed transmission over slow public and leased lines.
3. Centrally managed and policy driven. The Backup Administrator manages the entire configuration.
4. Each user is able to restore their files without getting the Administrator involved.
5. Encryption of remote office connections using their own VPN.

China Railways is the leading manufacturer of railway equipment in China. They turned to Cofio for help when it became apparent their old backup architecture could not ensure proper protection of critical engineering drawings and documentation related to 7/24 maintenance and support of the entire country's railway system.

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AIMstor was brought in for real-time protection of specific content based on file server and desktop users profiles, both at the local network and over the public network with easy encryption. China Railway now uses AIMstor on hundreds of its most critical content users, and can recover files updated just seconds ago.

As a service provider to a large network of hospitals and emergency departments around the US, it is imperative that ExitCare maintain recovery capabilities for their client's critical data and service infrastructure.

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ExitCare was experiencing backup windows that lasted several days, without a recoverable backup. After downloading AIMstor and installing it on several machines, ExitCare set up Real-Time CDP and Backup and began getting recovery points for their critical servers every minute. ExitCare now protects over 30 critical Physical and Virtual Machines with AIMstor, including SQL and Exchange servers for their environment.

Wiretap audio file evidence must be protected in its original form, and tracked in order to safeguard the evidence integrity. Millions of files need protection and controls in place at central and remote sites.

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A US Sheriff's Dept. working together with US Federal authorities (names withheld for protection) required the ability to replicate locally and remotely all wiretap audio files the instant they were created. They also needed to fine tune retention (multiple years) for specific files and data sets. With thousands of conversations being recorded at any given time, getting that fresh recording instantly copied was absolutely necessary to safeguard against data loss, thereby evidence loss.

Add to that the need to have any touches, changes or different versions of the files themselves to be tracked on primary storage and an immutable log archived, and any differences recorded as separate versions that could be accessed in the event of audit.

The Sheriff's Dept. that maintained responsibility for the data center turned to Cofio, installed AIMstor and within a few days had several repositories and mirrors up and running, with real-time tracking and versioning on the primary storage. Live transfer of any new file is done instantly, and numerous locations over a wide geographic space across multiple states are served.

Ronco was suffering from network congestion during scheduled backups, together with poor restore quality of backups. AIMstor was downloaded and installed for Source Side Deduplication and Live Backup, CDP and File Versioning.

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Today, Ronco has over 50 servers using AIMstor and maintains Recovery Point Objectives down to 1 minute per snapshot with no performance degradation, and the ability to recover Exchange and SQL servers down to the last second in the event of failure.

Retired Teacher of Ontario (RTO) required a real-time backup solution for their physical desktops and virtual servers, including Exchange and SQL. After researching a number of solutions, RTO downloaded AIMstor, setup several XenServer VMs and began evaluation.

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Soon after, RTO deployed the evaluation license on the rest of their machines and then decided to purchase AIMstor. Their backup window went from several hours per night, per machine, to Zero for all machines.

Republic Indemnity manages well over 100 servers in their mixed VMware and physical environment. After suffering large backup windows and massive network congestion during critical backup job times, Republic Indemnity opted to try AIMstor.

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After downloading and installing on several test VM servers, they began deploying AIMstor into their production environment themselves based on their own schedule. Like almost all other AIMstor implementations, this required no professional services beyond the first meeting for product training.

China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (SINOPEC) is one of China's largest oil and gas distribution companies.

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Cofio was brought in to help SINOPEC achieve the following:

1. Real-Time data protection for Oracle Server
2. Real-Time data protection for Notes Server
3. Batch backup for Linux and AIX Sybase server
4. Replicate data to DR site 600KM away
5. Centrally manage complete workflow
6. Reduced system resource impact for data protection

"We have very important Sybase ASE and Sybase IQ data running in our core applications. In addition, we have Oracle replication setup for failover. Being able to combine backup, CDP and data replication within the same product greatly simplified the workload on our remote office sites. AIMstor has helped reduce overall costs much more than we expected. Stated Mr. Zhou Yi of SINOPEC HEBEI Division.

"We purchased AIMstor because installation and setup took only a few minutes for real-time replication and bare metal recovery functionality..."

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Also, our user's sensitive medical data, and MediKeeper's business processes and work flows are easily integrated with Oracle, SQL and Exchange for end-to-end data protection.

Stated David Nguyen, CTO for MediKeeper, a health record cloud service company in San Diego,

KC America needed to control access to certain applications. AIMstor was brought in and installed on over 120 workstations with the IT Manager setting restrictions on certain applications by Blocking certain executable files. AIMstor allows the IT Manager to add or remove any Blocked application anytime, and apply to all Workstations instantly.

Prodigy MD provides a variety of services to the medical community ranging from practice setup to billing and collections. Prodigy needed to find a way to backup servers over low bandwidth lines and still complete backups for multiple Recovery Point Objectives each day.

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Prodigy MD's IT department at Prodigy downloaded and installed AIMstor, and chose to setup real-time backups and CDP. AIMstor now provides them with continuous indexed snapshots of multi-terabyte backups every few minutes, providing optimal restore at any time.

University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria (UIC) suffered from slow backups and large hits to their server I/O and network bandwidth with their legacy backup product. AIMstor was brought in to protect critical application servers such as MS Exchange and SQL.

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AIMstor now provides "to the second" real-time Backup protection with almost no discernible impact to server I/O and network bandwidth, together with Zero-Window Backup and Zero-Penalty Dedupe.

An US State Government Transportation Department (name withheld for security policy) required real-time replication of critical database data from multiple remote sites to their central HQ location, and then to backup the entire set up using their existing backup provider, Symantec NetBackup (NBU).

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AIMstor was downloaded and installed into the different remote sites to provide real-time byte-change transfer of all data directly to folders on the NBU Client at their HQ. NBU now executes backup of their entire environment using AIMstor to replicate remote sites in real-time.

Tangshan Maternity Hospital was funded by The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) 30 years ago, and remains the largest hospital for Women and Children in Hebei Province of China.

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AIMstor was downloaded and installed into the different remote sites to provide real-time byte-change transfer of all data directly to folders on the NBU Client at their HQ. NBU now executes backup of their entire environment using AIMstor to replicate remote sites in real-time.

Serving the most critical of young patients, Tangshan's IT department opted for AIMstor for real-time and batch based protection of the following:

1. Oracle Database real-time Replication, Backup, CDP
2. File Server real-time Backup, CDP
3. Oracle data archiving
4. Source-Side Deduplication of Backups to reduce network congestion
5. OS protection - dissimilar Bare-Metal restore

Tangshen Maternity now protects all important patient data with AIMstor, using real-time technology.