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BDRShield vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
BDRShield offers backup efficiency and protection, but users face significant initial costs and delayed financial benefits.
Sentiment score
6.2
CTERA's platform saves time and reduces costs, eliminating SSD needs and manual storage, with a two-year expense recovery.
Adding SSD storage to Windows file servers is expensive, and we no longer need to back up those devices.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I am positive that CTERA has helped reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for manual storage management and reducing storage service processes.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
BDRShield's customer service has mixed reviews, with delays in responses but generally helpful technical support despite time zone challenges.
Sentiment score
7.9
CTERA's support is highly rated for its accessibility, quick response, knowledgeable team, and effective global storage management.
Not needing technical support is even better than good technical support.
Director at Switact
They swiftly address concerns and take ownership of the call, providing a very satisfactory support experience.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
The quality and speed of support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is some of the best in the industry.
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
High-priority issues are handled promptly.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
BDRShield is scalable across environments, supporting large data volumes and future growth, with potential hardware upgrades for optimal performance.
Sentiment score
7.6
CTERA's platform excels in scalability and flexibility, supporting global use with easy upgrades, despite minor licensing challenges.
If we need to upgrade CPU and memory, we should be able to do that without a license upgrade.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It offers good scalability options, including vertical and outward scalability.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
BDRShield is generally stable with minor Linux issues; praised for reliable notifications and excellent Vembu support.
Sentiment score
7.3
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is stable, with resolved issues and occasional sync problems not disrupting overall reliability.
It has been pretty stable since then.
System Administrator at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
We had things deployed for years, and we were suddenly getting cloud sync issues that were crashing our sites.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It is very stable and reliable.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

BDRShield faces criticism for its complex UI, lacking features, support issues, and limited integration and stability options.
CTERA could improve monitoring, updates, user portals, logging, data distribution, legacy upgrades, AI integration, file editing, and permissions.
There could always be little things that could still be fixed or improved for stability.
Director at Switact
AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
The main problem is that if two people are working on the same file, for example, one in the U.S. and one in Israel, they can overwrite each other’s work without any notification.
CEO at rtt.co
It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

BDRShield provides cost-effective, flexible pricing options with some licensing complexity, praised for affordability and user-friendly experience.
CTERA offers affordable enterprise file services, reducing total ownership costs compared to EMC, NetApp, and Nasuni, enhancing market accessibility.
Unlike other solutions that require hardware purchases, CTERA offers software licensing with flexibility across multiple infrastructure providers.
Business Development Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
CTERA’s pricing should be more proportional and accessible so that cost is not the factor preventing customers from purchasing.
CEO at rtt.co
CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

BDRShield excels in automatic backups, seamless integration, and storage efficiency, ensuring quick recovery and effective multi-tenant management.
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers scalable, flexible data management with seamless backup, user-friendly interface, and reliable recovery.
The features I find most valuable are ease of backup, ease of restore, the full restore, just getting some data out of a backup server or even the applications that are in the server, going through the database or going to Exchange.
Director at Switact
As soon as something is written to the device, CTERA copies it to the cloud, where it's versioned with snapshots so we can recover it.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
A vital advantage of this platform is its instantaneous recovery capability, allowing seamless access to a secondary gateway if the primary one fails.
Business Development Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution.
System Administrator at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

BDRShield
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (18th), MSP Backup (1st)
CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Storage (5th), Cloud Backup (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (10th), AI Legal & Compliance (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Disaster Recovery (DR) Software category, the mindshare of BDRShield is 2.2%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 1.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform1.3%
BDRShield2.2%
Other96.5%
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
 

Featured Reviews

TA
IT Director at Boom Logic
Can automatically pull the virtual machines that we have in an environment
I like the fact that BDRSuite can connect to VMware ESXi and automatically pull the virtual machines that I have in that environment. I also like that you can choose to back up the compute to the backup server or go straight to the cloud. BDRSuite enables you to recover data instantly. When we need to recover data, I only need to start a backup job or a restore job. Depending on the speed of the server and the Internet, it should be able to download the files from the cloud and split them back up the way they were like nothing ever happened. The restore options BDRSuite provides are crucial because we use it for a lot of healthcare companies that have HIPAA requirements. BDRSuite is HIPAA compliant. We need it to be readily available and accessible in case something goes wrong. It lets you schedule backups to run every 15 minutes. I don't believe you can do it at shorter intervals because there's no way the original backups will finish in 15 minutes. It allows you to adjust the schedules. For example, if you don't want it to go during certain times, you can set that up. You can also choose between a full or incremental backup. There are settings you can adjust to make it work how you want it. Incremental backup is crucial because a full backup would increase fees or affect the local server because it would back up the entire volume every time. Instead, it does one full backup—say 12 terabytes— and adds to it in increments of 100 gigabytes, 200 gigabytes, etc. Whenever you want to add a backup job, there's a wizard that pops up telling you how to make a new backup job. It asks you what you want to name it and what you want to back up. Then, it asks you if you want to schedule it. There's an interactive display on how to do that.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
20%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
65%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Educational Organization
4%
Financial Services Firm
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BDRSuite?
The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite is cost-effective because you can purchase a perpetual license that covers multiple environments. You only renew the support costs annually. It offers advanced features at roughly 75 perce...
What needs improvement with BDRSuite?
I really don't know what could be improved about BDRSuite Backup & Replication. I've never had anything that I thought would be nice if that was possible. Every time I thought that, it was alre...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
I believe CTERA could improve their pricing experience by customizing price lists per region. For example, there is a difference between what is sold to customers in Israel versus U.S. customers. I...
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
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 America...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
We have approximately 80 nodes around the world and we're using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform mostly for unstructured file storage.
 

Also Known As

Vembu BDRSuite, BDRSuite Backup & Replication
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, Intel, CISCO, PHILIPS, Atos, HEXAWARE, Motorola
McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Find out what your peers are saying about BDRShield vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.