This IBM® Redpaper publication provides a comprehensive overview of the IBM Spectrum® Discover metadata management software platform. We give a detailed explanation of how the product creates, collects, and analyzes metadata.

Several in-depth use cases are used that show examples of analytics, governance, and optimization. We also provide step-by-step information to install and set up the IBM Spectrum Discover trial environment.

More than 80% of all data that is collected by organizations is not in a standard relational database. Instead, it is trapped in unstructured documents, social media posts, machine logs, and so on. Many organizations face significant challenges to manage this deluge of unstructured data such as:

• Pinpointing and activating relevant data for large-scale analytics
• Lacking the fine-grained visibility that is needed to map data to business priorities
• Removing redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data
• Identifying and classifying sensitive data

IBM Spectrum Discover is a modern metadata management software that provides data insight for petabyte-scale file and Object Storage, storage on premises, and in the cloud. This software enables organizations to make better business decisions and gain and maintain a competitive advantage.

IBM Spectrum Discover provides a rich metadata layer that enables storage administrators, data stewards, and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data. It improves storage economics, helps mitigate risk, and accelerates large-scale analytics to create competitive advantage and speed critical research.

Chapter 1. IBM Spectrum Discover overview

Chapter 2. Metadata essentials

Chapter 3. Sample use cases

Chapter 4. Deep inspection and the AI pipeline

Appendix A. Installing and setting up IBM Spectrum Discover