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Arcserve UDP vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 15, 2024

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

Arcserve UDP
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
11th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (19th)
CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
8th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (9th), Cloud Migration (8th), Cloud Storage (11th), Cloud Backup (11th), Cloud Storage Gateways (3rd), Content Collaboration Platforms (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Disaster Recovery (DR) Software category, the mindshare of Arcserve UDP is 2.4%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
 

Featured Reviews

TeresitaSabile - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost savings and efficient decompression but needs better cloud integration
Our primary use case for Arcserve UDP is its decompression feature, which helped us save money by reducing storage needs. Despite moving to cloud applications, we have been using Arcserve UDP for backup and disaster recovery Arcserve UDP has helped our organization save considerable amounts of…
Igal Muginstein - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection
The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's deployment process was straightforward."
"Arcserve has a feature called virtual standby (VSB), which has been very helpful because I already have a hot standby copy of my critical infrastructure. If something breaks, I can spin up that virtual standby copy in less than five minutes and ensure that my data is available to everyone and that business continuity is maintained."
"It allows us to back up all the servers and centrally manage them."
"The ease of use is the best feature of the product."
"It's simple to set up."
"Instant recovery is the most valuable feature of Arcserve UDP."
"The most valuable features are the replication to the cloud and the deduplication."
"We are satisfied with Arcserve UDP. The most important feature that we use and why we choose this product is the RHA feature."
"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."
"Our main reason for going for this solution was the uncontrollable growth of file data. It was unsustainable on our previous platform or technology. We needed something scalable like CTERA, so it was the scalability that we required."
"CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"The best feature is the migration tool within CTERA."
"The features I find most valuable are in the gateways themselves. They have done a great job over the years of providing insight into what is happening with our products, with the batches that come through that are scanned. I enjoy that part of it, and it is fairly easy to use from our standpoint once we get to know the product."
"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."
 

Cons

"A lot of their new technologies are not very good."
"One area for improvement in Arcserve UDP is its capability to interact with other cloud servers."
"The initial setup was complex."
"We cannot restore each user's mailbox. Each user's mailbox should be independently restorable. Also, this solution is very slow. If you select all of the servers, it runs for a long time... It needs to be faster. Finally, If anything happens to one server we should be able to switch to another server."
"We are looking at scaling up to the cloud and using immutable copies on the cloud. Arcserve UDP 8.0 does have the immutable feature supporting AWS, but I'm looking for multi-cloud support. So, I'm waiting for Arcserve to release that in the next release."
"StorageCraft ShadowProtect can improve by making one console that can control backups of all desktops and servers in one place. Additionally, the recovery process of the backups is very slow and could improve. It's very slow when we went to recover a complete disc but to recover one file is very fast."
"Licensing is an area that needs improvement."
"The time to backup servers that sit in DMZ must be improved."
"It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices. We have different regions, and we must log in to each portal to see what's happening with those. It would be nice to have a single portal to see the health of the devices, versions, and firmware upgrades. Sometimes, we want to dive into something more complex, like investigating why CTERA storage usage grew from 2 terabytes to 4 terabytes in a week. That's a little challenging. It's something we would like to see on the road map."
"I am looking for a process where version upgrades do not impact the customers. There is no downtime."
"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."
"One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, but they do not give us any further information. I would like to have more information on the logs themselves."
"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."
"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."
"The web portal that our users access to view data and backups could be optimized. CTERA could apply some of the improvements made to their administrative interface on the user side. The administrators are a much smaller group of people than the users, so it would be helpful if they targeted user experience resources to them."
"It has a learning curve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a bit pricey, considering the reliability problems. If the tool worked flawlessly, the price would be fair, even cheap."
"Normally our customers purchase the premium plus license, rather than the standard one, which provides more options."
"I feel that the product is fairly priced."
"In comparison to other vendors, it is a low-cost solution."
"The pricing is moderate."
"The price is based on the number of sockets. We use a four-socket price that includes two servers and the cost is $4,375."
"The pricing of the product can be considered to be reasonable enough for the Asian region."
"The price of StorageCraft ShadowProtect is competitive in the market."
"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Non Profit
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
70%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Educational Organization
4%
University
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Major Differences Between These 4 Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions?
Comparing the features of the four is not the right approach. You need to develop a list of requirements for backup and DR that are specific to your organization and then compare each of the four ...
What do you like most about StorageCraft ShadowProtect?
The interface is very refined, works fine, and is very intuitive most of the time. Scalability is nice. The multi-tenancy feature is very welcome. The integration with Linux works fine too.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StorageCraft ShadowProtect?
Pricing for SPX MRP/MSP is under $400 per server (Single VM) with a 1-year subscription. After discounts, it could decrease by 20%-30%, and opting for a 3/5/10 server pack may offer even better (lo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards.
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy. AI and automation features could enhance the ...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
We use it as a hosted cloud solution. We had initially tried Azure File Sync, but that did not work. Due to certain security concerns, I was tasked with researching alternatives. I evaluated severa...
 

Also Known As

StorageCraft ShadowProtect, StorageCraft Backup Analyzer
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ITPS, North Hertfordshire Homes, SEMIKRON, Kajaani University of Applied Sciences, Test Valley Borough Council, EK Services
McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Find out what your peers are saying about Arcserve UDP vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.