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Amazon FSx vs CTERA Intelligent Data Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon FSx
Ranking in File System Software
5th
Ranking in Cloud Storage
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (21st)
CTERA Intelligent Data Plat...
Ranking in File System Software
1st
Ranking in Cloud Storage
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Backup (7th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (5th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (7th), AI Legal & Compliance (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Amazon FSx is 6.0%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Intelligent Data Platform is 15.0%, up from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CTERA Intelligent Data Platform15.0%
Amazon FSx6.0%
Other79.0%
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Shared storage capabilities provide enterprise value with good reliability
Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS. The auto-scaling feature should be improved, as it currently includes downtime. I need to manually increase the storage, which is not ideal. Integrating FSx with Windows Server is challenging; it's a long process involving Active Directory (AD) setup and synchronization.
Tim M. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Supports global file recovery and rapid data versioning across 80 nodes
When we implemented CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform early on, and we've been on the platform for three years, we have three different cloud portals. We have an EU portal, we have an Americas portal, and we have an APAC portal. It would be nice if we could combine that into one portal just for that global single pane of glass look. We've talked with them about that and they say it's challenging just because of some of the structure, but that would be something nice if we could get that. I integrated with Varonis, and because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform didn't have initially a working relationship with that vendor, it would have been nice had that pre-existed us saying we need this. But that wasn't totally CTERA's fault. There was a lot of challenge working with the vendor to build out that interface. A single pane of glass for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform would be beneficial. Everything else works fairly well. We've never had a point where we couldn't get to something that caused us to have a serious outage, and that to me is the mark of a good software package. It's never really caused us serious issues. We have our issues, that's true, and every software package does. However, we've always been able to meet the needs of the business, and we drive hard on security, stability, and scalability. From the scalability standpoint, that's one of the most important things to us. We're on their capacity-based licensing, so if I need to ramp up another CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform NAS, if we have an M&A, I can easily and quickly spin up another NAS and start doing that data transition fairly quickly. The biggest maintenance issue with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is firmware upgrades. We've done a lot of transition from hardware solution to virtualized infrastructure in order to minimize that hardware lifecycle portion of it. We have to upgrade the firmware and sometimes that can be challenging in the nature of business of our size with 80 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform nodes around the globe. The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time. For our smaller sites, it would be an hour or two, and I can build that into a fairly easy change window. But in our larger sites where we may have hundreds of terabytes of data, that database update process took maybe a day or a day and a half. That becomes more challenging, especially in a manufacturing environment where people are wanting to access configuration files. We had to pin the data locally because the data would be available on the local edge filer, but the cloud sync, while it was updating the database, the cloud files weren't available. That would be the other thing I'd like to see an improvement on: some way to do those database upgrades either in a more segmented fashion or in some type of offline environment. I understand the logistics behind that sounds easy, but I'm sure it's not.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Amazon FSx a ten."
"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."
"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."
"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."
"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."
"CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities."
"CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has helped reduce our total cost of ownership by streamlining our operations; we've eliminated several backup tools, greatly reducing software licensing needs and cutting down our overall footprint, although I don't have precise monetary figures."
"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."
"The user interface of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is fantastic, providing a centralized console where we can manage all our Edge Filers and configure them through a very user-friendly interface."
"CTERA Intelligent Data Platform offers cost efficiency, and monitoring and administration are very easy."
"After we finished the implementation, after about six months or so of using it, it's good because all the administration tasks are done via a graphical user interface."
"I like that the glass is always half full with CTERA file services. It keeps the data hot for users on location and then tiers off older data. If you need it, the stub is still there. You can click on it, and it's back on the device."
"CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has positively impacted my organization in that it works as a file server, and centralizing things makes managing them in one location simpler than managing them everywhere else."
 

Cons

"From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS."
"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."
"I've been facing a challenge when doing a failover from FSx side. AWS console does not refresh within a half hour."
"A direct FTP feature would be beneficial instead of relying on transmission services."
"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."
"CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform can be improved, but I consider it to be good overall."
"There are some micro-level loggings that would have been better in improvising, and all those details are in the pipeline."
"CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is not as stable as a corporate would prefer."
"One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy."
"Setup and onboarding could be simpler, and reporting and troubleshooting could be more intuitive."
"There’s an issue with permissions, they aren’t always as transparent for customers as Microsoft’s, for example."
"The only challenge I faced with CTERA Intelligent Data Platform is with respect to monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."
"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."
"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."
"So far, pricing seems to be fine."
"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."
"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."
"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."
"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
University
8%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
33%
Computer Software Company
31%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon FSx?
From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS. Sometimes we go with Weka or other solutions due to this need, so it sho...
What is your primary use case for Amazon FSx?
Our customers mainly use Amazon FSx for high-performance computing. Our customers are mainly in the Life Science and Pharma industries. The majority of people are looking at S3 as their destination...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon FSx?
There is an ongoing project where my customers are exploring the FSx solution, but not yet for AI-driven projects; they plan to in the future. For those who want to use Amazon FSx, I recommend it a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it's just fine; we found what we wanted, and we could show the cost reduction compared to classic file server solutions combined with b...
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform can be improved, most likely by the support. Major problems are taking more time to resolve compared to other IT vendors we work with.
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
My main use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is file sharing at remote offices. A specific example of how I use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for file sharing at remote of...
 

Also Known As

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Neiman Marcus, T Mobile, Docxellent, Matrix, Lyell
McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon FSx vs. CTERA Intelligent Data Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,582 professionals have used our research since 2012.