21 Surprising things you can do with Starfish
Find uncompressed files and compress them
Peek inside headers of billions of image files to determine which are not compressed, then compress them.
1.
Create deep archive tiers
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.
2.
Automate workflows
Automate data-driven workflows for files coming from data acquisition devices and laboratory instruments.
3.
Repair your filesystems
Remediate various file system issues such as non-UTF8 characters in file and directory names and files with future dates.
4.
Billing support
Use quotas and space usage to automate generating quota and/or billing statements to users or departments.
5.
Dive deep into file content
Extract metadata from over 80 different file types for reporting, auditing, compliance, or arbitrary actions. Adding in custom metadata extraction is easy.
6.
Run scripts in parallel
Enable programs and scripts that were not designed for scale to run in parallel across petabytes of data and billions of files and objects.
7.
Replicate massive NAS
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.
8.
Migrate files rapidly
Migrate files to new storage devices at unprecedented speed
with true-ups, nuanced prioritization, hash verification, ACL support, and WORM support.
9.
Power your reports
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.
10.
Discover and manage PII
Discover and manage files that contain PII (personally identifiable information), confidentiality markers, export control restrictions, or other sensitive data.
11.
Identify and remediate orphan files
Find files and directories that are owned by people who have left your organization and re-assign ownership and group or archive them.
12.
Search file history
Look back in time for files that might have been moved or deleted (also works with recovering old versions).
13.
Compare two directory trees
Compare two directory trees (even big ones) highlighting differences between them.
14.
Encrypt, audit, and remediate
Reveal encrypted versus unencrypted files and take remedial actions. Clean up from ransomware attack or audit for policy adherence.
15.
Discover inactive trees
Discover the top-most directories of file system trees where no subtree has actively used data in a given time period.
16.
Automate cloud bursting
Automate cloud bursting for HPC and AI jobs moving data between on-prem and cloud resources.
17.
Eliminate need for NDMP
Enable file-based backup and restore with versioned and point-in-time copying. Eliminate the dependence on NDMP or NAS-to-NAS replication.
18.
Monitor filesystem churn
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.
19.
Enable inter-organizational sharing
Establish policies for sending files to shared repositories using Starfish-provided or partner-provided mechanisms like Globus.
20.
Permissions auditing
Find all files/dirs with non-blessed permissions and report or automatically fix them (e.g. world writable).
21.