The Starfish Glossary

AI data readiness is the degree to which an organization’s data assets are prepared, in terms of quality, organization, accessibility, and governance, to support AI and machine learning workflows.

A data catalog is a centralized, searchable inventory of an organization’s data assets, including metadata such as location, format, ownership, and usage designed to help users and administrators discover and understand available data without manually searching individual systems.

Data Lifecycle Management is a policy-driven framework for governing data from creation through storage, archival, and deletion to control costs and maintain compliance.

Data repatriation is the process of moving data and workloads from public cloud environments back to an on-premises  privately managed storage infrastructure.

Data sprawl is the uncontrolled spread of data across storage systems, clouds, and devices, creating visibility gaps, risks and hidden costs.

Data tiering is the practice of automatically moving data between storage types — such as high-performance flash, standard disk, and low-cost archive or cloud storage based on how frequently it’s accessed and how critical performance is to its use.

FAIR Data Principles are a framework for making research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, so both humans and machines can discover, understand and reuse data with minimal barriers.

File analytics refers to the analysis of file system metadata and activity such as file size, age, type, access frequency, and ownership to generate insight into how storage is being used across an organization.

File metadata is descriptive information about a file (name, size, owner, timestamps, permissions) and about its contents (format-specific tags like EXIF, DICOM, or FASTQ headers).

High Performance Computing (HPC) links thousands of processors into clusters or supercomputers so that massive workloads can be split into smaller tasks and run simultaneously.

Hot data is frequently accessed information requiring high-performance storage, while cold data is rarely accessed and better suited to low-cost archive tiers, and understanding this distinction drives intelligent storage tiering and cost optimization strategies.

Network-Attached Storage (NAS) is a dedicated file storage system connected to a network, allowing multiple users and applications to access shared data through standard file protocols like NFS and SMB.

Omics Data refers to the large, complex datasets generated by genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and related life sciences fields typically produced by high-throughput sequencing and analysis instruments.

A Petabyte is a unit of digital storage capacity equal to 1,024 terabytes, commonly used to describe the scale of large data environments.

POSIX is a family of IEEE standards that define a common interface for operating systems, enabling software portability across compliant platforms.

Research Data Management (RDM) includes the planning and processes by which research data is organized, collected, stored, shared, and preserved by researchers.

ROT Data (Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial) data refers to stored information that no longer provides business or research value: duplicate files, outdated versions, ownerless files, temporary files, or data tied to long-completed projects.