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CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Cloud Migration
8th
Ranking in Cloud Storage
11th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (9th), Cloud Backup (11th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (3rd), Content Collaboration Platforms (10th)
NetApp Cloud Volumes Servic...
Ranking in Cloud Migration
18th
Ranking in Cloud Storage
18th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Public Cloud Storage Services (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 5.4%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is 1.6%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Migration
 

Featured Reviews

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.
CC
Enables us to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly as our needs grow or shrink over time
NetApp delivers High Availability. It's critical to our work. That was the main driver for using NetApp. We have a highly resilient service and if you have a highly resilient service, you are only as resilient as the least resilient part of your infrastructure. That's what we were having trouble with our file system before. It was becoming troublesome, so we needed to find something that was much more highly resilient so that's why we moved to NetApp. The complexity of moving large numbers of files to the cloud depends on what you're trying to do. But for us, it was really simple. I imagine for large enterprise customers it is probably pretty tricky. They're probably on all different technologies inside a large corporation and they may or may not have very large pipes going to them. So if you're in a data center to the cloud then it's going to be easy, but if you have hundreds of branches like if you're a bank and have lots of branch banks, they might have very small pipes out to the internet. It might take forever. In our use case everything's brand new files, so it was pretty trivial. We didn't migrate to the cloud, we were already on the cloud, so it was a nonissue for us. NetApp enables us to share data across VMs. It actually reduced the amount of data storage we need. We were having to have storage attached to each VM. And now we can aggregate that storage across multiple VMs, so that actually gave us a net reduction, which was a good thing. We switched from using block storage to file storage to share data between our VMs. It made it easier, frankly but I worry about the scalability in the future. For the moment it made life easier. We were using block and then we moved back to file with NetApp.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."
"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."
"The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is a hybrid solution that supports both on-premises and cloud environments."
"CTERA has been particularly capable of keeping all of our workstations backed up. That became a critical feature for us during the pandemic when computers were rarely in the office. Everybody went off-site with their computers, and we were accustomed to working with a centralized storage infrastructure where people would come to the office and connect to the server to use, create, and modify files. Everything was done directly to that server."
"CTERA stood out due to its ease of use and superior security features."
"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."
"CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities."
"Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero. I was personally running all the infrastructure for the company. Now that we've moved to NetApp, I don't have to worry about making sure it's up and running. It's made my life personally much better."
"In terms of its storage snapshot efficiencies, the service is highly efficient. We are only doing things in small batches right now because we have not converted all of the data, but we have tested them in the Google Cloud and they work efficiently."
"High availability is very important to us because we have a production environment. High availability is the highest priority for us to continue keeping our systems running."
 

Cons

"They fixed all the requirements that we had in the beginning. The beginning was a little bit rough, but we tuned it nicely. However, in some cases, they could improve performance."
"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."
"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."
"However, in some cases, they could improve performance."
"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."
"One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy."
"The user interface has room for improvement. We would like this service to be more integrated with Azure, which is very easy to manage and use. It was easy to create volumes and add capacity pools in Azure, but in Google Cloud, we can only create separate volumes. We need more management or configuration options in the user interface."
"I would like for the sales team to get in contact more often and let me know what I should be doing next, what we should be doing about new features. So it would be nice if I heard a little bit more from him. From a technology perspective, I have no complaints."
"It would help if they increased the area in which they employ artificial intelligence, by starting to do assessments on the environments, to project those. They're not using any AI tools, currently, on the administrative side."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"So far, pricing seems to be fine."
"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."
"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."
"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."
"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."
"We don't need so much space, and there is no option to pay as we go or use just what we need. Also, the only way to increase performance is by increasing the level of the service."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
69%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Educational Organization
4%
University
3%
Educational Organization
34%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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Also Known As

No data available
CVS for Google Cloud, NetApp CVS for Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for GCP, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for GCP
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Atos, Bandwidth, Wuxi NextCode
Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.