Starfish Storage Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary

Starfish Storage Corporation, in metadata-driven unstructured data management, celebrates its 10-year anniversary.

Coinciding with this milestone, the company also announces it manages well over an exabyte of capacity across its client base. This includes 8 of the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical firms, 7 of the 8 Ivy League universities, Department of Energy supercomputing sites, and corporations in nearly every industry, including semiconductor, oil and gas, fintech, automotive, healthcare, consumer products, and M&E.

Starfish services the largest and most demanding file environments in the world. The typical customer uses parallel file systems and scale-out NAS to service the needs of scientific computing, AI/ML, engineering, rendering, and other highly demanding production workloads. These environments consist of billions of files, tens and sometimes hundreds of petabytes of capacity, and have a myriad of data management challenges.

Firm’s metadata-driven approach sets it aside from traditional file management solutions that rely on timestamps and coarse-grained analytics to make policy decisions. At the heart of tits platform is a data catalog specifically designed for unstructured data. The metadata and analytics capabilities of the catalog allow the company to service a variety of use cases (well beyond the table-stakes use cases of archiving and data movement) and address the nuanced needs of each set of stakeholders. Most importantly, the firm enables the end users who create and consume files to manage their own data with the appropriate security and safeguards.

Company founder, Jacob Farmer, explains: “In these large, diverse computing facilities where Starfish plays there are a myriad of use cases, often with nuanced implementation details. There are also many stakeholders including the users who create and consume the files as well those who are responsible for paying for storage capacity, various aspects of compliance, and ensuring proper data curation.“

Some of the use cases Farmer refers to include archiving, data protection, migrations, cloud bursting, cost accounting, data disposition, ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial) cleanup, FAIR data management, and AI/ML workflows.