Parsec Labs is a company of engineers. Most have designed storage systems, been responsible for backups and replication, or worked in networking building switches. Founded in 2013, their Unified Data Mobility and Protection Appliance provides the most straightforward tools for migrating, replicating, and backing up data at scale.

A Common Request

As a one-time pre-sales engineer, Mark Clark, CEO of Parsec Labs, noticed that many customers wanted to get additional value out of a storage solution that was being replaced. One common ask from customers replacing an incumbent storage solution was to use the replaced storage solution in a disaster recovery site. Usually, the answer was “No” due to compatibility issues.

Solving this problem was the genesis of Parsec Labs. The problem they set out to solve was to break down the protocol silos and allow customers to extract as much value as possible from their storage investments.

The Solution

Parsec Lab’s Unified Data Mobility and Protection Appliance can replicate/migrate data asynchronously between any two storage solutions, such as a file-to-file, object-to-object, file to object, or block-to-block. It is a single tool that supports File, Block, and Object data and the following protocols and interfaces: SMB, NFS, S3, iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and NVMe-TCP, as well as Parsec's own secure transmission protocol. Parsec scales to billions of files and objects, easily handling petabytes of Data. Cryptographic hashing of data in transit ensures that data arrives intact as well as sending only changed data, while AES encryption of data in flight ensures data privacy, which is especially important if it has to travel across a trust boundary.

A core tenant at Parsec is to liberate data. If data can move from one storage solution to another, it is mobile; if it is mobile, it cannot be held hostage by a single storage vendor. At any time, the data can be liberated from one storage solution and sent to another, eliminating vendor lock-in. 

Using Parsec is easy since it comes as an appliance that can be downloaded as a virtual machine. The business model is straightforward and designed to be predictable. Parsec charges a fixed per-appliance fee. There are no unexpected charges since the cost is not based on ingress or egress.

To help customers get started, Parsec Labs provides a Free Discovery Tool that can scan tens of thousands of files per second and build a detailed report on the total number of files, total number of directories, number of files in directories, and average file size. Additionally, the median file size and total size of all mounts in a network filer can be calculated. This tool will export JSON, XML, CSV, and HTML reports.

The Results

Replication, Migration, Consolidation, and More …

When you liberate data, organizations can cut down on storage costs and efficiently solve data movement problems that were difficult in the past.

• Data Replication - Replicating data to a remote data center, or to the cloud is a proven strategy for organizations requiring very short Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) in the event of an outage.
• Data Migration - Data migration has historically been complex, time-consuming, and subject to unpredictable costs. Most existing solutions are limited to a specific storage vendor or to only one type of data, forcing IT teams to license and maintain multiple tools and/or hire expensive consultants to complete a migration project. Parsec’s unique approach to data migration dramatically simplifies project complexity and reduces cost.
• Data Consolidation - Consolidating and reducing complexity saves money and increases efficiency. Parsec’s free discovery tool provides easy reporting and a deep understanding of data so data can be consolidated correctly.
• Data Repatriation - Data repatriation from public cloud providers is a special case of data migration that allows data to be liberated from the cloud and moved to on-premise data centers where cheaper compute resources reside. 
• Extending the life of storage resources - Upgrading a storage solution does not mean that the resources being replaced have to be thrown away. They can often be used in a remote data center for backups.

“People have been using our product for repatriation of data from big cloud S3 providers. Repatriation is a huge opportunity for both Parsec Labs and MinIO.”

Enabling Needed Use Cases

One of their capabilities is a native file-to-object backup feature that could serve AI/ML use cases by allowing a Data Lake built with MinIO to become a common repository for all data. This differs from other backup products, which convert the data into their format. A backup tool that can move data from many different sources to a single object store, like MinIO, not only backs up multiple data sources but also puts an organization's data under one roof. This is the perfect place to start an AI/ML initiative.

Parsec and MinIO

MinIO can be both a source and a destination for Parsec’s data mobility appliance. Parsec also uses MinIO to capture telemetry data and phone home logs from all its appliances distributed worldwide at customer sites. Each appliance has its own bucket in a centrally installed instance of MinIO in Parsec’s data center, and each appliance sends data to its bucket. Parsec tried other storage solutions, but they tended to fill up when it wasn’t convenient.

For more information, tune into the podcast.

“MinIO has been really helpful for us, and we don’t run out of space. MinIO is extremely reliable, and I can’t say enough good things about MinIO.”