21 Surprising things you can do with Starfish!

Peek inside headers of billions of image files to determine which are not compressed, then compress them.

Easily take advantage of “deep archive” tiers on cloud object stores. Copy files directly to and automate the retrieval process from the archive. Can be driven by users or admins.

Automate data-driven workflows for files coming from data acquisition devices and laboratory instruments.

Remediate various file system issues such as non-UTF8 characters in file and directory names and files with future dates.

Use quotas and space usage to automate generating quota and/or billing statements to users or departments.

Extract metadata from over 80 different file types for reporting, auditing, compliance, or arbitrary actions. Adding in custom metadata extraction is easy.

Enable programs and scripts that were not designed for scale to run in parallel across petabytes of data and billions of files and objects.

Replicate massive NAS systems to third-party devices (even object stores) without depending on built-in snapshot and replication utilities. For DR or HA for example.

Migrate files to new storage devices at unprecedented speed
with true-ups, nuanced prioritization, hash verification, ACL support, and WORM support.

Use tagging to create bespoke dashboards and reports for each of your stakeholders. View, email, and alert on hundreds of reports from management level through storage admin.

Discover and manage files that contain PII (personally identifiable information), confidentiality markers, export control restrictions, or other sensitive data.

Find files and directories that are owned by people who have left your organization and re-assign ownership and group or archive them.

Look back in time for files that might have been moved or deleted (also works with recovering old versions).

Compare two directory trees (even big ones) highlighting differences between them.

Reveal encrypted versus unencrypted files and take remedial actions. Clean up from ransomware attack or audit for policy adherence.

Discover the top-most directories of file system trees where no subtree has actively used data in a given time period.

Automate cloud bursting for HPC and AI jobs moving data between on-prem and cloud resources.

Enable file-based backup and restore with versioned and point-in-time copying. Eliminate the dependence on NDMP or NAS-to-NAS replication.

Easily monitor file system churn to reveal who has been consuming all of the free storage space or who created 1 billion files since yesterday for example.

Establish policies for sending files to shared repositories using Starfish-provided or partner-provided mechanisms like Globus.

Find all files/dirs with non-blessed permissions and report or automatically fix them (e.g. world writable).