Remote Office
Empowered By Next Generation Distributed Architecture
Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) Backup and Data Protection
Because AIMstor is a distributed architecture, remote office backup is an easy setup within the AIMstor data flow. Creating as many repositories as needed, both local, remote, or even cloud based, can be configured in seconds. Additionally, AIMstor is fully optimized to manage Remote Office Backup Workflow, and Unified Remote Office Backup Data Protection. Using several unified tools for various Recovery Point Objectives and Disaster Recovery needs to protect Remote Office data is not just smart these days, it is often a requirement.
Smart Remote Sync - SRS™
SRS is a standard AIMstor feature which allows highly granular remote synchronization between repositories across WAN lines or local networks. The administrators controls the schedule and SRS intelligently moves the data sets in an optimized fashion. For ROBO backups, nothing is more important than the efficient use of precious bandwidth to move critical copies of data for restore or even full system recovery.

Transportable Repository - TransRepo™
TransRepo is another AIMstor feature that gives you the ability to place a data repository on any Windows or Linux system. With TransRepo, AIMstor has the ability to seed a fully deduplicated backup, CDP, and file archive data set onto a repository, then unmount the repository in a fully encrypted format, ship the storage system to a remote site, and remount it onto another AIMstor repository at a remote site. SRS is then used to sync the repositories and keep data sets consistent.
Full Site Disaster Recovery (DR)
When two or more sites are synced with backup, replication, CDP or other AIMstor operations, full site DR is easily achieved using AIMstor's Dissimilar Bare Metal Restore function. Selecting your data classifications and recovery points to maximize consistency is a key value AIMstor gives to the user.
End-to-End Encryption
Over the wire or with transported media or disk sets, AIMstor provides options for encryption at every level.
Enabling Remote Office Backup Solutions
Remote office backup can be demonstrated in the following diagram showing the main HQ site, 3 Remote Offices, a private Corporate Archive in Dallas and Private Cloud storage site. Imagine applying Backups to the local Remote Office storage, CDP to the HQ storage, and Replicated data for DR at a corporate remote server site, then archiving Versioned files to the Cloud storage. The flexibility of AIMstor in Remote Office environments is unsurpassed.
Click the Features Tab (at top) to view specific benefits of AIMstor in Remote Office Backup setups
Optimizing Remote Office Data Protection
- Feature
- Benefit
- Smart Remote Sync
- SRS allows highly granular remote synchronization between repositories across WAN lines or local networks. The administrators controls the schedule and SRS intelligently moves the data sets in an optimized fashion. For ROBO backups, nothing is more important than the efficient use of precious bandwidth to move critical copies of data for restore or even full system recovery.
- Secure Encryption
- When working over unsecured network, AIMstor employs SSL with AES-256 encryption providing commercial strength security.
- Scheduled Bandwidth Throttling
- Scheduled bandwidth throttling can be configured allowing your WAN network connections to be heavily throttled during peak hours but the bandwidth opened up during off-peak hours.
- Roaming Machines
- Machines that are frequently on the move, such as corporate laptops that connect from multiple locations, can be easily directed to backup to a central site over public internet lines using encryption.
- Fault Tolerant
- AIMstor’s distributed architecture allows for loss of connection between the remote office and the controlling node ensuring that local backups continue without interruption.
- Firewall Support
- AIMstor offers easy setup to work with firewalls while maintaining VPN-free secure connections. Remote offices do not require any firewall configuration changes if they allow outgoing connections
- Source Dedupe
- Remote repositories employ AIMstor’s source side deduplication. Because only unique data is transmitted and stored, and the work load on your network and primary systems is drastically reduced.
- Incrementals Forever
- By only sending changed differences, coupled with dynamic-rehydration, AIMstor recreates full snapshots of the data on the fly allowing fast restores of all data, or any file.
- Policy Distribution
- Whole Policies and Partial Policies can be assigned to any Node, Group and Repository of choice allowing for flexible and simple office and remote office backup solutions.
- Monitor Systems
- Each instance of AIMstor will manage the client domain with real-time monitoring of data transfers, events and logs.
- Node Management
- Authorizing and de-authorizing nodes at customer sites is easily done. Machine groups can be created on the fly to attach to policies and data flows in seconds.
- Unifies Backups
- Backup and Recovery to and from multiple offices, handling different type nodes, laptops, desktops, file servers and application servers, for all-in-one, high performance, protection
- Tolerant Cache
- If the amount of data that needs to be replicated continuously outstrips available bandwidth, data is kept on the source until bandwidth increases for off-loading the data
- Network Compression
- A selectable and tunable feature, forces compression of data sent across the network, decreasing network usage
- Live Monitoring
- Data movement activity can be monitored using the live monitoring facility. Meters and status icons show Network outgoing and incoming queues, and Network percentage utilization
Unified Remote Office Data Protection
- Feature
- Benefit
- Next Generation Live Backup
- Eliminates the inadequacies of Legacy Backup by providing zero-wait backup windows, unified deduplication, and fully unified disk repositories that can scale to your needs.
- Continuous Data Protection, CDP
- Similar to backup, but optimized for faster Recovery Time Objectives, AIMstor CDP can be used with Backup, and can use the same data, allowing the source to move the data only once. Perfect for a local Remote Office Repository to facilitate easy and ultra-fast restore
- Real-Time Replication
- Synchronous, Asynychronous and Asynch Journaled Replication for local and remote sites, with on-demand restore and disaster recovery. With Replicator, you can implement a single, truly unified solution, mixing other tools such as Backup, CDP and Versioning within the same policy instance
- File Versioning
- Because AIMstor auto-classifies dataMore frequent backups cause no CPU or system overhead on the source machine. Data is captured incrementally as it is changed or created. A backup is in effect a point of consistency triggered from the source to create a snapshot in the repository
- Next-Generation Restore
- Granular and full image restores, with indexed object store for search capable files. Browsing snapshots based on search parameters, and many other restore advantages that are simply not available outside of AIMstor
- Multi-Tier Backup Deduplication
- Utilizing several backup deduplication schemes, from the point of primary data change awareness, to transfer of data, and post process, AIMstor reduces storage capacity needed many fold. See data deduplication for more information
- Bare Metal Recovery
- Utilizes existing backup and CDP repository data to enable restore to same or dissimilar systems, such as VM to Physical, VM to VM, Physical to VM. Provides easy, 1-2-3 process for bringing up a system from a completely new replacement, fully unified as part of AIMstor