San Diego, CA (PRWEB) March 09, 2012

Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of unified backup, replication and data protection software, announced an aggressive upgrade program for users of the RepliStor product from EMC Corporation, which was discontinued last year.

Cofio will provide a discounted AIMstor Replicationnode to upgrade existing RepliStor machine licenses. Cofio’s AIMstor Replication provides fast, easy and agile replication, making it the logical path to replace the legacy EMC RepliStor product. Using centralized workflow management, AIMstor can modify configurations for hundreds of machines in minutes.

AIMstor Replication includes real-time replication at the byte level in synchronous, asynchronous and asynchronous journaled modes, bandwidth tuning, and secure encrypted SSL for WAN disaster recovery and failover. AIMstor provides “application aware” replication of SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint and Oracle at no added charge.

As a next generation solution, AIMstor also provides real-time CDP, Backup and File Versioning from the same replication data stream for any data or application. Storage of such snapshots can be done locally and at remote facilities with intelligent synchronization and global deduplication, while the same live replicated data continues to a live file system on a physical or virtual machine.

Availability and Pricing
AIMstor Replication v2.5 is has a US List Price of $1,200 per replication source or target, and Cofio will provide a special discount for any existing license of RepliStor that it replaces. Installation and setup is normally done in a few minutes, even with dozens of machines.

Cofio will provide a temporary and fully functional license for evaluation setup and testing. Please use Coupon Code “REPLACE EMC” when ordering. Offer is for limited time only.

About Cofio Software, Inc.
Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Workflow and Compliance. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures. AIMstor currently has several patents pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: http://www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2012 All rights reserved

All Copyrights and Trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Contact:  Cofio Software Corp.
Corporate Communications
858-581-6500
pr@cofio.com

SAN DIEGO, Calif., January 30, 2012— Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of unified backup and data protection software, introduced TransRepo^TM, a new transportable repository function, in its currently shipping release of AIMstor^TM Version 2.5, the only truly unified data protection solution in today’s market.

AIMstor provides the ability to place a data repository on any Windows or Linux system. Now 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, ship the storage system to a remote site, and remount it onto another AIMstor repository at a remote site.

Once there, administrators have the ability to restore any type of data from any point in time, for full system recovery, or specific recovery, such as the OS from last week and the SQL application from 2 minutes ago, or entire virtual machines from a few seconds ago.

The repository is encrypted using AES-256 bit algorithm to safeguard against the storage system being lost in shipment.

The TransRepo can also be used to recover large data sets that are not feasibly transmitted over wire in enough time.  Simply unmount the repository from one site and transport to another site, and restore all systems locally.

Fast, full site disaster recovery with AIMstor TransRepo

AIMstor v2.5 already has received accolades for its Smart Remote Sync (SRS) Remote Office Backup capability, allowing highly efficient remote backups over WAN lines from central to remote sites to increase corporate recoverability.

TransRepo was designed with the idea that many data sets must be synced locally, but transported remotely via standard shipping methods.  TransRepo and SRS represent only part of the AIMstor solution, which includes fully unified real-time and batch backup, CDP (continuous data protection), global deduplication at source and target, archive with file version control, real-time replication and dissimilar bare metal restore.

Brian DeMuro of F5 Solutions in New York noted: “We normally use AIMstor for recovery over the network, but for large datasets, it’s simply faster to unmount the repository to a 2TB USB HDD, or a small RAID, and bring it to the disaster recovery facility.  For customers we host and those with remote offices, we’ve found this to be a big advantage over traditional methods.”

TransRepo is a feature within the AIMstor Workflow User Interface, a Drag ‘n Drop approach to setting up entire workflow for backup, business continuity, disaster recovery and compliance archive in minutes.

Availability and Pricing

AIMstor v2.5 is available with customers using it in advanced storage infrastructures around the world.  TransRepo and Smart-Remote-Sync come at no added cost and are standard features within the AIMstor Data Protection Suite.

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Workflow and Compliance. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures. AIMstor currently has several patents pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: http://www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2012 All rights reserved

All Copyrights and Trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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SAN DIEGO, Calif., September 6, 2011- Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of unified backup and data protection software, introduces Smart-Remote-Sync™ (SRS) in its upcoming AIMstor™ Version 2.5, to be released in September 2011.

AIMstor’s SRS technology addition greatly improves efficiency of IT resources and transfer times when moving data from one location to another via a wide area network (WAN) to a disk based repository for Data Protection, Disaster Recovery (DR) or Searchable Archive. AIMstor v2.5 has been optimized for Remote Office Backup, Backup for DR and for Managed Service Providers (MSP) offering remote backup services to their clients. Today’s IT professionals and Backup Service Providers need solutions to effectively move data from one location to another with minimal impact to resources. To what extent this efficiency is achieved relies upon the intelligence and awareness within and between repositories throughout the enterprise.

SRS enables synchronization between multiple data repositories and differs from conventional backup approaches by the granularity in which it performs the synchronization between systems. Unlike legacy backup products, SRS goes beyond the all or nothing approach. SRS enables you to synchronize only the parts of the repository that you require and with full control of the periodicity at which in happens. Consequently you may choose to perform hourly SRS transfers of application data but weekly SRS transfers of OS images.

With AIMstor v2.5, data is scanned only once from servers and workstations using Global Source De-duplication, further reducing IT resources. Disk repositories then move data to any number of local and remote repositories according to user defined policies.

Tuned for WAN environments, Smart-Remote-Sync can utilize Encrypted SSL connectivity between end-points, single port firewall connectivity, source and end point de-duplication and bandwidth throttling.

“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 compute time and disk resources.”, says Bryce Kerker, of Burkhart Dental’s IT group.

This intelligence behind AIMstor’s SRS aids IT organizations to meet data protection service level agreements with minimal impact to IT resources and in many cases allows for remote backup without added expense of larger bandwidth resource. Smart-Remote-Sync is a simple component within AIMstor’s Workflow User Interface, a Drag ‘n Drop approach to setting up entire workflow for data protection and archive in minutes.

Availability and Pricing

AIMstor v2.5 is scheduled to be released this month to all new clients and users under current maintenance support agreements. Smart-Remote-Sync™ comes at no added cost and is a new integrated feature within the AIMstor Data Protection Suite.

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Workflow and Compliance. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures. AIMstor currently has several patents pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: http://www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2011 All rights reserved

All Copyrights and Trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Unifies Changed Block Backup for Physical and Virtual Machines

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) July 25, 2011 – Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of unified backup and data
protection software, has released support for the VMware vSphere 4, vSphere 5, ESX/ESXi 4 and 4.1.

AIMstor vSphere Add-on Details: Cofio’s AIMstor vSphere Add-on offers comprehensive backup and recovery support for VMware’s ESX/ESX(i) 4, and vSphere 4.0/4.1 and 5.0 platforms. Capabilities, all managed through AIMstor’s Workflow User Interface, include:

• Block-granular near-continuous backups using VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for big reductions
  in Virtual Machine (VM) I/O loads, backup transfer capacities and network traffic.
• Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for VM machines via VMware host. CBT can now be done to guest host VM’s via vSphere using the AIMstor agent, transferring changed blocks to secure backup targets. AIMstor uses its own similar technology called Changed Byte Transfer to protect data on physical machines or VMs with its resident agent on the machine.
• Application consistent recovery of Exchange and SQL.
• Granular recovery to allow file and folder level restore from VMs after boot.
• Allows you to set single or multiple backup targets for local or remote VM restore.
• Optimized data transfer for low bandwidth networks using vSphere CBT or AIMstor’s Source Side Deduplication.

Flexible restores options to choose destinations for fastest possible restore, such as:

1. Restore a VM to its original host, or another host
2. Cloning, which is a restore assigning a different group name
3. Restore to any specified datastore on any host
4. Restore to any specified resource group

“Today AIMstor already unifies many critical needs at our current customer sites for both physical and virtual data protection,” stated Charles Crampton, CTO of NetBase Technologies, a solution provider to banking and healthcare customers throughout the Southeast. “We can now extend AIMstor’s coverage below the guest OS down to the VMware vSphere vStorage API level in those same environments.”

Availability and Pricing

The AIMstor vSphere Add-on is available as an add-on to AIMstor 2.5, and is installed on any VMware-supported Linux or Windows platforms (Windows 2003, 2008, and Linux OS’s with kernel 2.6 and later). The agent is also available as a virtual appliance for deployment on any VMware ESX or ESXi hypervisor. Pricing starts at $1,800 per VMware vSphere host server.

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Workflow and Compliance. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures. AIMstor currently has several patents pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: http://www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2011 All rights reserved

AIMstor Unifies Backup, CDP and Replication for Real-Time Protection of VMs and Hosts

SAN DIEGO, Calif., June 27, 2011— Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of unified backup and data protection software , issued a success story available on its web site describing the challenges of IPC Logistics, Inc. in maintaining real-time protection for its critical infrastructure of Windows Hyper-V machines and hosts for aviation logistics customers.

IPC opted to replace its previous installations of Symantec’s BackupExec™ for backup, and Vision Solutions DoubleTake™ for replication after IPC’s IT Operations team evaluated AIMstor™ software from Cofio. The AIMstor solution is a single downloadable application and provides unified live backup, real-time continuous data protection (CDP), and real-time replication for restore, recovery and standby failover.

Pete Musacchio, President of Operations at IPC Logistics stated, “AIMstor provides us with real-time 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.”

The user case study is available on the Cofio website at: Customer-Success-Stories

About IPC Logistics, Inc.

IPC is the industry recognized leader in providing complete Aviation data solutions to a wide range of aviation clients via their IPC Online Aviation Scheduling Integration Service called OASIS. IPC serves millions of records per day to clients on a 7/24/365 basis.

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Workflow and Compliance. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures. AIMstor currently has several patents pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2011 All rights reserved

All Copyrights and Trademarks are property of their respective owners.

• Each time you grab data from a machine and send it over several thing happen: there is an I/O “hit” on the machine, a network hit due to the data transferred, and another hit on your “destination” (storage server or in the case of replication, your mirror). In VM environments, this hit is multiplied.
• Unifying 1, 2 or several “tools” allows for a single I/O hit, and a single transfer of data.
• Avoiding the Legacy Backup trap is the other item. Full/Incremental/Delta with dedupe at the target site creates 20X, 30X or more data than you need to process at the source, then to go over the network, and then to process/compress at destination.

Below is an example of file servers from remote locations executing fully Unified Backup, plus CDP and Replication to a central site.  Almost zero I/O impact, and Bandwidth improved by orders of magnitude.

AIMstor at work delivering multiple RPO's in one policy

The benefit of this approach would be many, many different RPO snapshots, locally and remotely, full or granular restore, and also failover to a standby server.  A key advantage of this approach is the use of source dedupe and “changed byte transfer” to avoid old style backup issues. Also, if you can combine several tools to act upon the same data,  there is one “copy” action – but it becomes available in several different styles of backup Recovery Points Objectives (RPO’s) from your snapshots.

That means I get lots of ways to recover a system, or restore a specific file or folder or even a VM, via one highly efficient network transfer. I can also instantly failover to an available mirror if need be.

The question is how much protection do you want, and how do you want to pay for it in bandwidth and I/O costs? Using the major vendors out there, this capability costs a fortune in actual money, and it typically doesn’t come with any of the network and I/O efficiency.

At Cofio, we have looked high and low and we can’t find anything that operates with the effectiveness of AIMstor in doing this. Every other vendor we have seen seems to insert other processes and data movers under the hood.

How do you take data changes when they occur, send it once, receive it data once, then process it once to make it “recoverable” data in many different recovery points, retentions and failover formats? All the while saving big time on precious I/O and bandwidth?

Yep, that’s AIMstor.

Download available for Windows and Linux:

http://www.cofio.com/AIMstor-Download/#FreeTrial

Press Release - SAN DIEGO, Calif., May 24, 2011

— Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of  unified backup and data protection
software, today announced it has signed an agreement with WISDATA Systems, a leading provider
of storage solutions in China. Under the terms of the agreement, WISDATA will market several
of its storage server appliances, utilizing Cofio’s AIMstor software, throughout China.

• Unified 4-in-1 appliance for Backup, CDP, Archive and Replication
• Single application interface for End-to-End workflow management
• Source and Target Deduplication for a 95% bandwidth and capacity improvement
• Rack footprint of 30TB in a single RAID enclosure
• Secure transfers of data over WAN and public internet with encryption

Established in Beijing in 2000, WISDATA Systems employs its own research and development
team, and delivers storage area network (SAN) and storage security solutions that require high
reliability RAID storage solutions. WISDATA Systems serves customers in the public sector, the
oil and gas industry, finance and manufacturing.

"Cofio and WISDATA have designed a simple yet powerful solution that helps customers
maximize storage efficiency, protection and recovery speed," said Mr. Cui Yi, Director and
Vice-General Manager of WISDATA Systems. “This is a solution with capabilities never before
unified in a single footprint appliance.  No one else in the world provides this type of
offering.”

"We chose to partner with WISDATA because of they specialize in high performance data
protection and availability" said Tony Cerqueira, President of Cofio Software. "They offer
excellent sales and support capabilities throughout China for private and public sector customers,
and they are longtime storage experts."

About WISDATA Systems

Established in 2000, WISDATA Systems, Ltd. is headquartered in Tsinghua Science Park in
Beijing, China. The WISDATA platform of storage solutions includes the company's Macrostor
and Wis series of disk arrays and storage management software. With years of expertise in
storage technology and storage management, WISDATA fulfills customers' data security and
business needs from beginning to end with data storage consulting, design, implementation,
maintenance, training and other value-added services. WISDATA's experienced engineering and
technical professionals, highly skilled in the deployment and management of high-capacity,
heterogeneous storage solutions, help protect customers' information assets with reliable
technical support. www.wisdata.com.cn

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Workflow and
Compliance. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement
alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures.  AIMstor currently has several patents
pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US,
Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2011 All rights reserved

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SAN DIEGO, Calif., May 11, 2011—Cofio Software Inc., a world-class provider of unified backup and data protection software, today announced it has delivered the first Microsoft SQL Server protection solution with continuous consistency for maximizing SQL performance and uptime, and most granular Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), with zero-window backup and deduplication.

Cofio’s flagship product, AIMstor 2.4, now provides automatic identification of SQL data on a single machine, or in a network of MS SQL servers, syncs them to the AIMstor repository and uses its continuous source side deduplication technology to transfer data in real-time blocks for the most granular and fully consistent MS SQL Server RPO’s available today, with unified replication for real-time server failover as an option.

AIMstor is the first and only solution to fully unify all the key data protection technologies into a single application. In a single policy AIMstor is able to provide:

-Real-Time backups that are synchronized with the applications ensuring full application consistency. Granular recovery points of up to an hour with retention spanning years.

-CDP backups with an “up-to-the-second” image, allowing flexible retention spanning days.

-Real time replication providing immediate secondary image suitable for application failover.

-Touch-once technology enabling Real time backup, CDP and Replication to be used together without any additional CPU or network overhead on the source system.

-Backup and CDP to a common repository provides in-line “common block single instancing”, enabling dual technologies to be used without doubling storage.

-Real time capability total removes the backup window.

-Full restore from any incrementals, removing the need for full backups.

-Suitable for low bandwidth environments after initial synchronization

AIMstor can be installed and setup without ANY application downtime. Even the initial backup can be performed on a live and active system.

AIMstor’s latest technological breakthrough includes bandwidth performance enhancements that can accelerate backups 10X to 20X over legacy backup products, a 95% reduction in storage capacity, and simplicity for exponential increases in IT management efficiencies. AIMstor can also restore SQL databases at the disk write and read speeds available, network bandwidth permitting.

“We see lots of customers with SQL backup problems,” noted Mike Kornblum of MPAK Technology, a storage solution provider based in California. “With AIMstor, they get zero window backup, with recovery points down to one second ago, or one month ago, and recovery speed is amazing. More importantly, backups are done in real-time, and deduplication is done at source, so the SQL servers or the network never suffer performance degradation.”

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, which unifies Data Protection, Archive and Disaster Recovery. As a next generation application, AIMstor is highly efficient as a replacement alternative to legacy backup and recovery infrastructures, offering superior cost savings and new improvements in data Workflow and Compliance. AIMstor has patents pending with the USPTO. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: http://www.cofio.com

Copyright (C) 2011 All rights reserved

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Data must go places to be safe  ~  People need:

• Central data protected on-site, for fast restore / recovery of systems, data and applications.
• Central data protected off-site, for restore / recovery of systems, data and applications in case your Central on-site data and copies are all destroyed
• Remote Office data protected on-site, for fast restore / recovery of systems, data and applications.
• Remote Office data protected off-site, like at the Central location, ideal for data centralization, and to augment restore / recovery of systems, data and applications in case your Remote Office on-site data and copies are all destroyed
• And to also protect Remote Laptop workers, meaning they need to get their data to a location somewhere, then to make sure that is duplicated somewhere else.
• Add to the above the need to have data protected in restorable form, like from a backup, and other data such as databases, replicated or mirrored in “live” filesystem mode for failover. This should also be on-site and off-site.

There are many, many details in the recipe above, but what it comes down to is basic: You need to distribute protected data in order to survive failures and disasters.  But you need to deduplicate at certain places in order to get it done effectively and without choking bandwidth, I/O or capacity.

Types of Protection: Just 1, or Many?:

How many ways can you protect and backup data?  LAN backup, local snapshot, mirrored application to a live VM or server, remote backup, file archive, etc. etc.  Lots and lots of ways.

Capacity & Bandwidth Issues: 40X more than you need?:

Unfortunately, if you are using legacy backup and data protection products, you can spend orders of magnitude more on capacity and bandwidth than a next generation unified product with inherent deduplication.  Maybe 20X to 40X more.  Maybe even more.

Have you considered Legacy Limitations?

Legacy limitations are all over the board, here are only a few:

• Client/Server architecture isn’t Distributed: Media/Slave Servers must be in operation for clients to execute.
• Backup Set data transfer: After you suffer from the backup set creation, you need to get it out of there. That’s a lot of data, it won’t be kind to your I/O or your bandwidth. Especially for Remote Sites.
• Pulling data several times mirror and backup:  Your backup and replication are typically separate processes, typically separate products, so your machines need to write out your live source data to both. That’s a lot of overhead.
• Handling VM and Physical machine needs. Handling Laptop needs.  Will you need a separate product for each?

So What’s The Answer?

The ability to easily distribute multiple instances of protected data in highly efficient and de-duplicated mode, while optimized for long haul transmission would be great.  It would be better if it had several tools to allow for things like Local Snapshot, Real-Time Backup to the Changed Byte Level, Dissimilar Bare Metal Restore when needed, and more.  In short, AIMstor, read more about it here

Below are 2 images of the AIMstor user interface showing how Distributed Backup can be performed with full deduplication at source and target, providing with capacity savings over legacy approaches approaching 50X in many scenarios.

>Below is Central Site with Local Copy Protection, and Central Data Copy at Remote Sites as well<

AIMstor Distributed and Unified Backup

>Below are Remote Sites with Local Copy Protection, and Remote Site Data Copies at Central Site<

AIMstor Distributed and Unified Backup

Press Release – San Diego, Calif., March 21, 2011

Cofio Software Inc., building upon the recent success of its software product, AIMstor™, announced the release of version 2.3. AIMstor software is the first application to combat “IT Sprawl” and the unnecessary spread of point solutions into the data center. AIMstor unifies numerous several data protection technologies into a next generation real-time backup, archive, replication and deduplication solution for Windows and Linux environments.

The new release offers:

Secure Distributed Architecture providing the following:

-Secure connections between all distributed AIMstor Nodes using Open SSL.

-Firewall Friendly for Remote offices and workers using VPN or Public internet for Remote Server, Workstation and Laptop backup and file archive.

-No Media Server Intervention, therefore, no bottlenecks of “Legacy Remote Backup”.

-Fast Remote Site Connection to all AIMstor Nodes.

-Cloud Ready for object storage of archived files and versions with set API.

-CIFS Support with easy click through setup.

-Linux Bare Metal Restore ready for upcoming versions of AIMstor’s Dissimilar BMR.

-Refined Source Side Deduplication capabilities providing faster Repository processing for reducing Client Backup network nodes by over 95% compared to Legacy Backup.

-Application Consistency Support for SQL and Exchange backup and replication to compliment AIMstor’s “to the second” crash-consistency.

-Real-Time Statistics of Repository conditions and activity for snapshots, data transfers, indexed items and capacity planning.

-Improved event notification for Backup, CDP, Replication and file level activities.

AIMstor is targeted at IT Managers of small to medium IT infrastructures who seek simple and cost effective ways of unifying backup, archive, real-time disaster recovery and compliance of data storage. Cofio pursues sales through resellers, system integrators, appliance vendors and OEMs. AIMstor version 2.3 is now available for download with registration at the Cofio website.

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, a next-generation application for real-time Unified Backup, Replication, Deduplication and Archive with easy Workflow and Compliance. AIMstor’s unique tools can be purchased independently while remaining unified under one single application for end-to-end data management and protection. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software since 2006 with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: http://www.cofio.com.

Cofio and AIMstor are Trademarks of Cofio Software Inc., All Rights Reserved

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• The obvious question is:  Why do we do it?
• The common answer is: That’s the way it’s done.
• Well, not anymore.

With Source Side Deduplication, not only does a network realize efficiencies of +95% reduced bandwidth, but all Client systems process +95% less than normal backups.  Backup target disk process +95% less than normal deduplication targets.  We term our own form of Source Dedupe in AIMstor as Changed Byte Transfer.

Data Classification can be the difference between taking just the fillet and whole cow.

Unlike normal backup systems, Changed Byte Transfer technology monitors data changes in real-time, at the byte level, and transfers them immediately (or caches them if the network is down). Toss in target based deduplication and the efficiencies become indisputable.

More importantly – AIMstor does this to select data sets. You may want the whole system or the whole disk partition.  Or, you may only want your SQL data.  You may only want Excel files that belong to your Accounting group that are more than 7 days old.  Whatever you want, you simply have to drag and drop with the AIMstor Data Classification tool and adjust your policy.

So now instead of a 95% load reduction on Client, Target and Bandwidth over legacy Backup, with Data Classification it can become more like a 99.999% reduction. It depends on what you want on your specific recovery points.  If you want to run 10 different backup policies via schedule (batch) or real-time (continuous), you can mix them to your heart’s content.

Data Reduction on systems and networks is only one benefit of Data Classification. But it is a good example of how to intelligently tune data reduction strategies on data protection requirements such as Backup, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Replication for Standby Failover, and File Archive. All of which are unified and interchangeable functions within AIMstor. And of course, all of them work with Source Side Deduplication, and Data Classification.

If you’ve decided you want the steak instead of the whole side of beef, try downloading AIMstor and setting up a quick install walkthrough with one of our people.

http://www.cofio.com/AIMstor-Download/

Cofio Software Inc., today announced an upgrade to its software product, AIMstor™, an application that unifies several data protection technologies into a next generation real-time backup and deduplication solution for Windows and Linux environments.

The new release provides:

-New timeline view of file versions and snapshots, which can be shown together with real-time user touches and modifications to data. Ideal for archive compliance of documents.

-Additional management utilities for its object storage repository.

-Event notification for Backup, CDP, Replication and file level activities.

-Real-time tracking and alerts of user file system activities such as deletes, changes, moves.

-New support for Linux Master, Linux Client and Linux Deduplicated Repository.

-Client side snapshots, which can be used for Replication nodes to invoke rollback points.

AIMstor utilizes a workflow interface for fast drag and drop of policies and data flow of physical and virtual machines and groups. AIMstor’s target and source deduplication provides massive performance and efficiency increases across the board over traditional backup and replication products. They include:

-Up to 95% reduction in LAN/WAN bandwidth over standard backup

-Up to 95% capacity reduction over standard backup

-Uses Changed Byte Transfer to reduce 95% of workload during physical and VM backups

-Installs and configures in minutes for workgroup to data center

-Optimize restore times 3X to 100X with intelligent Tag-Store-Index of all data

AIMstor provides several separate, yet fully unified data protection tools. User can select which tool to use for specific policies, depending on actual business process and workflow requirements. They range from Live or Batch Backup, to Continuous Data Protection (true CDP), Real Time Replication, and Bare Metal Recovery. And because the repository is fully indexed, it can also serve as an active archive to users for fast file search and retrieval.

At China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (NYSE: SNP), one of China’s largest oil and gas distribution companies, Mr. Zhou Yi of the SINOPEC HEBEI division said, “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 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.”

George Crump, Analyst and Chief Steward of Storage Switzerland, noted, “Most organizations have zero confidence in their ability to recover data in a timely fashion. This has led to data protection sprawl, where multiple applications are used to protect often the same data set over and over again generating non-integrated workflows that increase operational expenses as well as capital expenses. Ironically there is no increased level of confidence when these systems are put to the recovery test. AIMstor is an excellent example of a single product that combines unified backup, which lowers capital expenses with a data protection workflow that lowers operational expenses.”

At MediKeeper, a health record cloud service company in San Diego, CTO David Nguyen stated, “We purchased AIMstor because installation and setup took only a few minutes for real-time replication and bare metal recovery functionality. 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.”

Cofio Software’s CEO, Tony Cerqueira, stated, “Managing data end-to-end used to require a complex and costly integration of many different products for the user. AIMstor makes it fast, easy and affordable because it is a unified application from the start.”

AIMstor is targeted at IT Managers of small to medium IT infrastructures who seek simple and cost effective ways of unifying backup, archive, real-time disaster recovery and compliance of data storage. Cofio pursues sales through resellers, system integrators, appliance vendors and OEMs. AIMstor version 2.2 is now available for download with registration at http://www.cofio.com.

About Cofio Software, Inc.

Cofio is the creator of AIMstor software, a Unified Backup application that brings together Deduplication, Data Protection, Workflow and Compliance. As a next generation solution, AIMstor offers unique tools that can be purchased independently, yet unified under the same application for end-to-end data management and protection. Cofio is a global supplier of storage software since 2006 with offices in the US, Asia and Europe. For more information please visit: www.cofio.com.

Copyright (C) 2011 All rights reserved

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Prost! to the Metadata

Looking for that one PDF file from a virtual machine backup from a long, long time ago?  Or how about “anything” the CFO ever created? Or anything that Employee “X” ever modified?

Good luck.  If you don’t have intelligent Metadata to help you, you might be having that beer next weekend instead of tonight. It can be that bad, or worse.

Consider the idea of retrieving all the PDF files on the file server from Department “A” via traditional, legacy backup. You go to your “restore window” filesystem or snapshot view, click through, and eventually begin digging them up, one user after another, one directory after another, one sub-directory after another, and so on. Borrrrrring.

But if you have intelligent metadata managing your multiple backups, you can just insert a search term, based on, yes, Metadata.

When it comes to next generation data protection, Metadata separates the mice from the men.  You ain’t got it in your architecture already, you’ll have to integrate, and that’s never pretty.

For backup, file versioning and archive, Metadata provides an enormous value for short and long term strategies.  Short term, searches are ultra fast, users can utilize backups like archives, because retrieving a file is like a directory file search, plus, a file system view.

Long term, the sky is blue.  Metadata tagging, end-to-end data management, combined with intelligent data protection and storage management becomes Information Management.  Either way, drink up, for Metadata is the nectar of the Information Gods.

If there is an ominously absent capability missing from the legacy backup products of today (and yesterday), it would be sticky policies that follow data wherever it goes, and auto-data classification that occurs when a file is created.

The capabilities to serve these needs are so obviously missing from the old backup paradigms (still with us today, mind you), that 2 things are starting happen:

1) People know this stuff is missing. They feel it in their bones. They also feel it when they need to look at piles and piles of data, and want to somehow make sense of it. But they can’t. They also want protection to happen the moment it is needed, with a simple policy.  Not when a backup product tells it to.

2) Vendors know this stuff is missing as well. Many of them operate in the world of block and volume data, and simply have no chance to manage information while they are backing up or replicating blocks of bits, instead of information.  Others have no way to manage metadata intelligently or actively. So they try to “market” their way around it.

The problem is impossible to fix within today’s legacy backup infrastructures. And its not going away. It will simply grow, exponentially, unless you start getting after it.

AIMstor from Cofio was created with policy based data management, and classification of data in mind.

Giving users control of what they want to do with data (Live Backup, CDP, Real-Time Replication, Tracking, Archive, etc.) is one thing. Giving users the ability to do it intelligently, such as withworkflow and data flow is something else altogether.

It’s true.  CDP is tremendous technology, offering granular point-in-time restore that backups simply cannot do. But CDP (Continuous Data Protection) has severe retention and data management limitations, so backup is absolutely necessary.

But – why do CDP if you cannot get it FULLY UNIFIED with your backup solution??  I don’t mean “integrated”.  Any moron can “integrate” a CDP product with their legacy backup product (and, many have, mind you). You just tell the people in marketing to make the box look the same, and update the user manual.

THE TRUTH: CDP is ONLY worth doing, if it comes FULLY UNIFIED with a next-generation backup solution (optimally, with inherent deduplication). That way, they share the same data mover, the same repository, the same metadata, the same underlying data structure and supporting infrastructure.

I dont know any other product besides Cofio’s AIMstor that does this. You get granularity of CDP, with smart retention flexibility of AIMstor’s next-gen Backup, and all the great policy driven capabilities that come together with it. You can also empower Bare Metal Restore from your backup and CDP sets, which are fully single-instanced for huge capacity savings.

More importantly, because AIMstor auto-classifies data, you can SELECT what you want to CDP, and what you want to Backup, and what retention you want for very specific types of data, or whole categories of data. Standalone CDP  products are kinda, well, dumb. They like to move . . . everything. Optimal? Uhm, not.

So what happens if you buy CDP that is NOT unified with your backup solution? Triple the data movers, double the repository setup and capacity usage, double the overhead to servers and clients, double the admin time, double the infrastructure. Plus, you probably can’t select what you really want, so you will just end up wasting even more resources.  Why do it?

Legacy Backup is a major market in the data protection space, and is still going strong. Regardless of its inefficiencies, people still buy it, and add onto their existing Legacy Backup environment. However, users are starting to take notice.

Every user backup forum will often point to lack of Legacy Backup products to deliver any upstream value, and their typical failure rates as a result of server-dependent architectures, and their terrible storage inefficiency.

In addition, many environmental factors have crept into the woodwork at user sites (business intelligence, eDiscovery needs, compliance requirements, etc.), and now that the paint is off, people are finally getting a look at what’s underneath the hood of Legacy Backup products. It won’t be long.

Deduplication was a key first mover that really made people question the insanity of Legacy Backup. Why create something so inherently inefficient that it required such a huge level of clean-up? (remember, 20X or greater is the typical deduplication cleanup rate).

Cloud architectures will soon expose even more inadequacies in the Legacy Backup camp. Forcing many vendors to accomodate Cloud storage in strange, non-optimal ways.

Virtual machine sprawl has added more headaches to the Legacy Backup camp because of I/O and overhead issues created by Legacy Backup, and multiplied by VM’s.

Additionally, users are becoming more reliant on other tools within the market to make up for the lack of flexible recovery capability of Legacy Backup. CDP, Replication, Bare Metal Restore, and others, are coming into play in the mid-market.  As are technologies that help manage information; index/search tools, data classification, policy management, and tools that control data for added layers of security or monitoring.

There are many others, but these ones stick out. When things be

The terrible inefficiency of Legacy Backup has created new markets and new companies over the past decade in the storage backup space.  Many are fixes applied to Legacy Backup itself, many others are another form of Legacy Backup, that solve some issues for a key market or vertical. Many have been proven to solve real world problems, caused, of course, by Legacy Backup.

So, what is Legacy Backup?  You are probably using it right now in your data center, your remote office, or your SMB, and most certainly, in your enterprise.  It’s a product that protects your data by doing several things based on a schedule, then sends a copy of some processed data to disk or tape. Unfortunately, it batch copies data, creates massive and unnecessary duplication of data, and has no ability to share its repository, its processes, policies, metadata, data movement, or any of its significant infrastructure with other data protection products (like CDP, Replication, Archive, etc.).

The great thing about inefficiency is that it creates need.  And where there is need, there is opportunity. But the reason for the need, it is now being learned, is that Legacy Backup is the problem.  Like any boom or bubble, Legacy Backup will . . . utlimately . . . pop.

The New Yorker Magazine has is a great read for anyone considering the strategic aspects of real-time versus batch processes, (from databases, to running a girl’s basketball team) in this article titled “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules“.

In the world of storage and information management and protection, the parallels to current legacy point products are impressive. Today’s leading backup products reside completely upon legacy architectures.  They are still, by and large, run as batch processes, are not searchable, do not provide real-time differencing, and have no real-time capability to tie into other data movement or data management capabiliites. You could say many of the same things about many other tools used within the IT dept.

It would be nice to turn a key, and make it all real-time, but that won’t happen. Fundamentally, it requires changes in the way systems, physical or Virtual Machines, are managed, and how responsibilities are distributed (if they are).  The legacy Client/Servers approaches completely rely on outdated policy distribution communications (batch), where connectivity must remain intact to execute their “server -to- slave server -to- media server -to- client” laundry list of batch “stuff to do”.  They need a lot of hand holding in order for things to happen, and for policies to be executed. A short list of issues with legacy products:

o- Batch methods require scans, trawls, polls, etc., all of which drag down resources

o- Batch I/O stacks up fast on VMs, and goes medieval on their host systems

o- Data changes can be discerned, but data touches cannot be tracked

o- Data classification, if any, is after the fact, instead of at “point of creation”

o- Compliance is via “batch” time slices, not real world “second-by-second” views

o- Metadata consistency is always a day late and a dollar short

o- Repository data always has a “window” of difference with primary data

o- Deduplication remains after the fact and separate

If users want to explore the road of real-time, they will need to seek new solutions that are outside of the realm of their current vendor portfolio, because vendor leaders  just have too much invested in existing legacy code bases. New architectures, which provide self-managing nodes, together with scalable and distributed storage, are the key to deploying more value across the enterprise, on a granular, simple and cost effective basis.  . . . Did I mention . . uhm . . . AIMstor?

In response to our CTO’s last blog (Why Volume CDP and Replication products are so Wasteful), and because it is Black Friday, a day with a serious shopping theme, we had a few comments out there from a few Volume Replication Vendors, so I thought I would answer them here and keep things better organized:

Comment 1:  I guess it depends on what the volume contains. And the purpose of doing it in the first place. Certainly replicating or CDPing a system volume doesn’t seem to make much sense unless the reason for it is Disaster Recovery at a remote site. But replicating or CDPing a volume that only contains business critical data could be meaningful particularly in compliant heavy environments. Were the donkeys nodding?

Answer 1: There are some noisy applications.  In this particular example it was Sophos anti-virus.   But the OS can do very well all on its own too. OS vendors even call out noisy directories that should be avoided during backups, because there is no value in a restore, and there is an obvious cost to replicate it.  It is also not untypical for an application to want to create temporary files that have no business value on the same volume as the database. You want to replicate all that too?

With Volume CDP grabbing it all, that extra 40GB-50GB per machine gets expensive.  Multiply that by a large number of machines, and the overhead is very large.  Plus, the extra of CPU, energy, and bandwidth sending wasteful and unneeded data is another big cost that adds up quickly, and then goes exponential once you consider the enterprise.  That is the essence of the problem with Volume CDP and Replication. It is indiscriminate by nature and grabs everything.

Kind of like a starving barbarian with a big shopping cart at the grocers on double-coupon day, she can’t even resist taking the trash with her.

The Donkey’s weren’t nodding, but they were chuckling.

Comment 2: Couple of things that are puzzling to me in your blog are the fact that there were 40GB of wasted capacity in a single server during 1 week? That would certainly not be the norm and if it was there would be other useful conversations to have with a client.  As for CDP being intelligent enough to distinguish useful data. Great idea and most enterprise CDP solutions will have this ability now or in the near future. Even more important when considering replication is evaluating solutions that will compare data on the local and remote site and deduplicate before replicating the changes across the wire. We have customer examples that were able to shave 70%+ off replicated data!

Answer 2: We are simply saying that it’s a good idea to avoid sending all that unneeded data, in the name of simple logic, speed and efficiency.  The only effective way of combating this is by understanding the data (which is what AIMstor has solved).

I’d be interested in seeing how the Volume replication vendors address this.  I suggest that they can’t.

Volume replication argument have generally been that the “customer” ought to reconfigure their system to suite the replication technologies inability to address data types or data classifications.  Have a volume for one thing, another volume for another , etc.   While it certainly may make sense to partition your system, the point is,  customer shouldn’t be forced to because of the failings of the CDP product. Let the customer partition storage based on what makes sense to his application, not because of the inability of the volume CDP product.

The fact is also, CDP shouldnt just be for the application.  Why shouldn’t it be used for the system volume as it provides a good DR image as well?  Or something even more radical, why not provide a hybrid, period transfers of parts of the system but CDP granularity of other part of the system.  Imagine you have a volume that is both the OS and the application (OK example normally for smaller setups), you could take periodic images of the OS, but then CDP the application data.  This will minimize data transmitted and provide very nice and granular application restore, with safe set of periodic images of OS. You also get big overhead reduction, plus, savings on CPU, energy, bandwidth, etc.

Bringing up the de-duplication topic is interesting too.  Understanding the data you are de-duplicating substantially increases the de-duplication rates, like we do.  That is also why Data Domain excels, it distinguishes the data boundaries and doesn’t treat everything as a dumb block.   Would be good to know how much of that 70% replicated data savings you mention was just white space elimination? – which should have never been transferred in the first place.  If so,  am puzzled because that approach, which is typical among all Volume-approach vendors, seems to be making a mistake, and then the vendor congratulates himself for later correcting his mistakes.

And that’s supposed to be a “solution”?

I’m often bewildered by the prevalence of volume CDP  or volume replication products.  This is the type of replication that works at either the whole disk or the partition level.    At this level, everything that is replicated is a dumb block.  There is no context as to “what” the blocks are . . . so, everything is replicated.

So let’s talk about something fundamental – wasted data transfers, wasted storage, and unnecessary system loads.

First let me describe a real world problem.  We had AIMstor setup to Backup, Version and CDP an assortment of machines.  We’d select the whole machine so that we could perform point in time bare metal restores in conjunction with file versioning of user documents.  Many of the machines were office systems, although what we’ve observed would have been exactly the same for a file server.

We decided to analyze the weekend traffic.  Note: because it was the weekend, we really didn’t expect an awful lot of traffic as the systems weren’t in use.  What surprised us however, is the amount of useless data that collected over this period.  We know operating systems can generate noise in the way of unwanted, temporary files, but for this test, we turned “off” all of the filtering within AIMstor.  What shocked us though was the incredible amount of useless data that was generated that has absolutely zero value.

One system alone, generated a staggering 40GB of temporary files.  A large amount of this was created by a virus checker.  Fortunately, because AIMstor works at a very granular level, this type of waste and noise can be easily filtered out.

Take your average Windows OS and you will find a lot a data written to disk that has no value to the business.  The system’s pagefile and prefetch files are constantly being written to.  This is before you apply virus checkers or user applications like Skype (yes it writes a lot to disk), Temporary Internet Files, etc.

And this is where volume level replication is so wasteful.   With Volume Replication everything is transferred and stored.  Factor a CDP system and then you are looking at capturing, transferring and storing a lot of unnecessary data.

Consider also that every block transferred is a load on the source system, the network and storage subsystem. There is a awful lot of energy and resources that goes into supporting Volume Replication and Volume CDP products . . . for no good reason.

So . . . Company A (which ships one of these, maybe a Backup, or a Replication, or a File Archive product) acquires Company X (the creator of say, a CDP Product), and then announces their sincere plans to combine both solutions and to deliver huge value to their existing user base.  A few weeks later, they have a brand spanking new CDP software box on the website, a new data sheet showing what seems to be tight integration of Company X Product into Company A Product, and a press release that extols the virtues of this newly integrated solution, promising “Single Pane of Glass” yadayada yada.  Hey, they might even have gotten the GUI from the CDP product to work a tad bit with the Company A Product (always in a meaningless way, but, working together none-the-less).

Don’t be fooled.  The game of product integration, the headaches it creates, and the expenses and risks associated with it are all still there.  Understand this: Integrated solutions are not bad. They are necessary, and they are your only choice in many circumstances.

What is bad is the “Marketing Spin” you get from some vendors, that things are “fully integrated” to a level where the products look and work in a “seamless” fashion.

Don’t they know you can go to hell for lying?

Sure, for the customer, now there is one vendor and one throat to choke, but those solutions are still separated, in every material way that matters.  And sure enough, too many calls to support will soon mean that your most recent investment in the new product from your old supplier, will eventually turn into shelf-ware. Your investment is lost, and your problem and pain remains.

Stove-piped solutions that are forced together by the sheer will and cost of vendor provided professional services, are lessons in complexity, poor ROI, and overworked IT staff. Sometimes you have no other choice, and must deal with it, regardless of the cost and pain. The desire customers have, to believe vendors who acquire products, and buy into their claims of getting a platform, instead of several separate products, is what gets them into trouble.

“Hey, wait a minute” you say, “these are big, big companies, with hundreds of engineers.  They will make the solutions work together, and I will get the solution that I want.”

That makes sense, until you look at the track records of all major vendors in the storage/data management space.  After hundreds of acquisitions, billions of dollars spent, thousands of infrastructures uprooted and redone, it is still hard to show tight integration between any of the solutions.

It is however, easy to show the disparities between them, the incompatible metadata, the separate business processes, the redundant repositories, the conflicting data movers, the contradictory data classification schemes, the incompatible policy schemes, and the archaic mindsets that emanate from legacy architectures that date back 15 to 20 years.

I have no beef with honest vendors who go out and give it their best to integrate with other products, or multiple products they offer, in order to deliver a solution.  We do the same thing at Cofio with some solutions, and of course we have the advantage of a TRULY UNIFIED set of solutions in a single product, AIMstor.  What  I have a hard time understanding, is how some vendors (you know who you are, big and small) can lie so boldly, mislead customers, and claim unified or tight integration, where none exists.

So, we all know now that the old legacy backup solutions create HUGE waste and require deduplication appliances. But now, for users considering upgrading their environments for “intelligent backup”, DR, replication, or archive, or simply to herd the cats of unstructured data, there seems to be confusion among users about the issues of:

-Source Deduplication (doing the dedupe at primary data), versus

-Target Deduplication (doing the dedupe at the repository).

A number of articles and postings have been put out there, but it typically comes down to the same question: What is best, doing it at Source or Target?

We asked the same question. Then we said, heck, why not BOTH?

This is why AIMstor was originally architected to provide 4-step Dedupe.  Source level dedupe via 2 methods, and Target level dedupe via 2 other separate methods:

Source Side Dedupe:
Step 1-Duplicate Transfer Avoidance: At the initial sync between node and repository, if the repository has the data already (from a previous node), it tells the node to only transfer only “new” data. Saves a lot of time, network bandwidth, and initial repository capacity is minimized.

Step 2-Real-Time Changed Byte Transfer: At the same time, with subsequent Backups, CDP,Replication and Versions, AIMstor will only transfer changed bytes from the node. That reduces network traffic and load on the node. Because AIMstor is real-time, there is no scan or trawl.  So data constantly trickles from the node when it changes, and hits the repository as the RPO settings for the backup.

Target Dedupe:
Step 3-Multi-Level Single Instance Storage: Because the AIMstor repository is unified across Backups, Replication CDP and Versions, it allows only a single instance of a file, no matter where it came from.

Step 4-Global Object Deduplication: Also in the repository, AIMstor runs a final step post processing deduplication algorithm across all data sets from all machines. Thereby finalizing the deduplication with four complete steps to best reduce the total amount of data capacity used in repositories.

The AIMstor repository automates all this as part of any policy.  The good news, is that is downloadable now, and available for Windows environments.

Lot’s of talk out there these days about the value of agent versus agent-less approaches to deploying data protection and data management tools.

After all is said and done, I think it boils down to a simple question of value versus convenience.

Agent-less designs are convenient for deployment, say, for very basic backup capabilities. That is about where the advantage ends.  They cannot deliver much value other than what the OS and network tools allow. This becomes confining and inflexible to users with greater data management needs at the SME and enterprise levels. Agent-less design also come with some level of painful “cost” to users (probes, scans, queries, etc, to get a look at data, and then extract it).

This is why all major vendors have deployed their solution in agent format.  They can deliver more value, in a less painful way, with greater control on added value. We have not seen any proof to a next-generation agent-less architecture out there. OS’s and network protocols are basically the same, but there have been a few work arounds to offer more value, which is great.  Still, compared to relative basic value you get with even the most legacy agent based products, it’s not much.

However, there is a very BIG problems with agents: There are simply TOO MANY of them.

Vendors issue agents to each machine for backup, for replication, for file archive, for VMware protection, for changed data tracking, for forensic monitoring, for data leak blocking, and other things. All these agents are redundant to some degree, but vendors cannot figure out how to get them to work together. Yet, while there are too many agents, the abilities of agent-less solutions (yes, including the mighty cloud) to provide equitable levels of value down to physical or virtual machines that are on-premises, is simply not there.  The obvious approach is to limit agents, and unify the value of multiple agents, into fewer agents (a single agent?)

Basically, create a platform that allows more and more tools to be added. If the user wants to activate them, great. If not, then just use the one or two tools you do want.  Use the others next year if you need them. The bottom line, is that you have limited the number of agents proliferating throughout your network, and increased value on a per agent basis several-fold.  And, you don’t have to deal with any of the agent-free negatives we put together down below.

Agent-less approach, the bad side:

• File transfers via the network share APIs are much much slower than through an agent designed for that purpose.
• An agent-less solution consumes more CPU because the methods of accessing the data have many layers of protocols designed for general purpose.
• The systems needs to be polled constantly to find out what is new.  The polling method won’t be nice, it will require their server to basically log on, scan the logs etc and then move on.
• Because the network interface lets you know what file has changed only, you can only get the whole file.  This makes it useless for any database application or email server but frankly isn’t very good for such things as PST files which are regularly 1-2GB in size.
• This only works when you are connected.  Data isn’t journalled so there is no tracking of and versioning when you are disconnected.
• You wont be able to compress the network traffic.
• Sometimes vendors mask the fact that “transient agents” or “security code” must be deployed to clients, which can also be a similar hassle to real agents to deploy / manage, but far less value.
• Someone changes a password, services can be interrupted.
• For Virtual Machine protection, the agent-less polls and scans will multiply the pain and workload on the physical systems, multiplied by the number of VMs, where I/O issues already exist.
• Some agent-less vendors market CDP. Truthfully, it is a poll on the file journal logs, its not real time.  Its not really CDP.
• For data leakage, detailed monitoring, and content security, the problems multiply by a huge amount. How do you deliver any level of compliance without real-time understanding of granular data changes?
• Too many issues to name without writing a book.