Prestigious International Awards Program Recognizes Outstanding Data Technology Products and Companies
WALTHAM, Mass., April 3, 2025 – Starfish Storage, the leader in metadata-driven unstructured data management, today announced that it has been selected as winner of the “Data Solution of the Year for Education” award in the 6th annual Data Breakthrough Awards program conducted by Data Breakthrough, an independent market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global data technology market today.
Starfish provides unstructured data management and metadata for files and objects. Its unique and versatile application helps to manage files and objects at any scale, ranging from departmental file shares to the world’s largest supercomputing file systems.
Starfish was initially built for scientific research data management including grant-funded EDU research facilities. Academic institutions use Starfish Storage to help control their storage overhead costs, serve the needs of researchers, and continuously improve their data management practices. The Starfish data catalog provides an in-depth understanding of an institution’s file system, data ownership, file system history, analytics and growth rates. The solution’s automation engine supports easy movement and migration of data, automated workflows and flexible archiving practices. Most importantly, Starfish offers unique features that empower researchers to see and manage their own data.
Recently Starfish showcased its deployment at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). At Harvard FAS it is being used to optimize data and storage management across several hundred research labs. It is also a key part of the institution’s storage chargeback system, generating close to $2M a year for IT to invest in new infrastructure. Raminder Singh, Senior Director of FAS Research Computing, noted, “By giving our users clear visibility and reports into what data they have, how it is being used, and who is using their storage allocation, we enable them to get serious about what they need to keep and what can be moved to cold storage or deleted. From what we have seen so far, they will be able to purge upwards of 20PB of existing data”
“Cost effective data and storage management is more important to educational institutions than ever. Giving IT leaders and research departments clear visibility into what data they have and how much it is costing allows them to both control storage costs and capitalize on the value of their data assets,” said Deena Berton, CEO of Starfish Storage. “We are grateful to accept this award from Data Breakthrough.”
“Starfish delivers the insight and tools needed to manage data in academic research environments effectively.” said Steve Johansson, Managing Director, Data Breakthrough.
“It offers true innovation by empowering researchers to responsibly manage their own data. We’re so pleased to award them with ‘Data Solution of the Year for Education!’”
The annual Data Breakthrough Awards is the premier awards program founded to recognize the data technology innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the world in a range of categories, including DataOps, Data Analytics, AI, Business Intelligence, Data Privacy, Data Storage and many more. The 6th annual Data Breakthrough Award program attracted thousands of nominations from across the globe.
About Starfish Storage
Starfish is the unstructured data management platform for high performance computing (HPC), AI/ML, and other demanding file-based workloads. Starfish provides a unified index and a common API for addressing, managing, and moving files across a diversity of file storage systems, including HPC file systems, scale-out NAS, conventional file servers, and S3-style object stores. Starfish is vendor-agnostic, supporting devices and services from all hardware, software, and cloud vendors. Common use cases include data classification, protection, archiving, migration, ROT cleanup, cost accounting, and workflow automation.
Starfish supports such a wide variety of use cases due to its super-flexible architecture that combines a metadata-rich catalog with a scale-out data mover and batch processor. The feedback loop between the catalog and the batch processor enables automated data classification, metadata-driven storage management policies, user self-service, and file-processing workflows. For more information about how your organization can unlock the power of its data, please visit Starfish Storage at https://starfishstorage.com/
About Data Breakthrough
Part of the Tech Breakthrough organization, a leading global provider of market intelligence and recognition platforms for technology innovation and leadership, the Data Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring innovation and market disruption in data technologies, services, companies and products. The global Data Breakthrough Awards program provides a forum for public recognition around the achievements of data companies and solutions in categories including data analytics, DataOps, data management, infrastructure and hardware, storage, Business Intelligence and more. For more information visit DataBreakthroughAwards.com.
Tech Breakthrough LLC does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our recognition programs, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with award designations. Tech Breakthrough LLC recognition consists of the opinions of the Tech Breakthrough LLC organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Tech Breakthrough LLC disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this recognition program, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
