Anand Prahlad’s career prepared him to understand that data is precious, protecting it is expensive, and data residency regulations can complicate safeguarding a company’s most valuable assets.
Anand leads Parablu in delivering an innovative solution for enterprise data protection. With a career spanning engineering and product leadership roles at McAfee and CommVault that focused on data storage, backup, and recovery, Anand discovered that most of the money companies were spending on data protection was for storage dedicated to backup volumes. At the same time, these organizations were spending millions on storage subscriptions with services like Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Google Drive. Those subscriptions often accounted for petabytes of unused storage.
With Parablu’s SaaS offering, large enterprises get a backup and disaster recovery solution with the data protection, security, and geolocation compliance they need, while leveraging the storage they already pay for. Backups run locally and then are stored on-premise or in the customer’s existing cloud storage subscription in a respective region.
Parablu provides a singular data resiliency solution that ensures privacy, confidentiality, and security of digital assets in public, private, and hybrid clouds. A centrally-managed platform, deployable to all digital assets wherever they reside, Parablu has become an essential partner for medium-to-large enterprises across the globe, especially where regulations dictate that data must remain inside the country.
Data is more distributed than ever, weakening the control enterprises have. With the sharp rise in ransomware attacks, it’s easy to see how much harder the security administrator’s job has become. Parablu helps with early threat detection services that generate ransomware attack alerts. Curated recovery—which intelligently filters out ransomware-infected files from returning during the restore—and the ability to quarantine files and devices during the security incident management process all contribute to the solution the company provides.
“Many customers don’t understand the law governing data residency,” said Anand. “So, it can be helpful to have a company that understands and stays on top of it for them.”
Parablu started working with Akamai Linode when it hosted the company’s first customer in 2017. Over the years, Anand and his team have evaluated other options, but the reliable performance, dependable services and support, and an intuitive user interface made consuming Linode services easy.
“If you’re looking for really good Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Linode beats the hyperscalers in terms of reliability, performance, and cost,” said Anand. “And, as the frequency and severity of IT challenges continue to grow, we know Linode will help us continue delivering to keep our customers’ data protected.”
Increase in storage efficiency with upgrade performance
Parablu’s service is delivered via a set of I/O-intensive applications. It writes at sustained speeds of several gigabytes per minute. Parablu had been using spinning storage media, but once NVMe block storage became available from Akamai Linode in the Mumbai data center, it switched to this new, high-performance offering, delivering significantly faster speeds for the same price. “The move to NVMe was easy for our team, and support from the Linode Customer Success team made the switch straightforward,” said Anand.
Parablu also joined the Akamai Linode Partner Program, which, Anand points out, “improves troubleshooting by giving our team even more confidence. We feel like our concerns are heard, and our partnership is valued. We’ve stayed with Linode because it works without being overly complex, and the Partner Program gives us access to the right expertise to solve our problems.”
As Parablu continues to grow and serves new customers, Akamai Linode data centers in Europe and the US are becoming a more significant part of the mix, enabling data to stay local wherever the company’s customers are located.
