Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Oracle ZFS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 File System Software
2nd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (4th), Cloud Backup (7th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (6th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (9th)
Oracle ZFS
Ranking in File System Software
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 10.8%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle ZFS is 8.2%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform10.8%
Oracle ZFS8.2%
Other81.0%
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

Richard Saini - PeerSpot reviewer
The ransomware recoverability has helped with our data protection mandates
File replication and versioning seem to work very well. We did have some challenges at the beginning, but all of that has been resolved now. It works very well. It does what our users require. Replication is excellent. We needed that, and the versioning is also pretty important. One of the reasons we chose CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform was the requirements we had to have ransomware protection. Our existing solution at the time would not have met those requirements of being able to restore from a ransomware incident. What we wanted from a platform was the ability to restore a snapshot or restore a file system or data back to a previous point in time, and CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offered us that. Availability was a very key feature of why we liked the solution. It is effectively like the disaster recovery feature, and that also lends itself to replication. It works very well for our ransomware recovery objectives. There is business growth due to being able to offer greater storage capacity for them. Before, we were running into storage limitations, and now that we have enabled CTERA, we can accommodate more data and users. When it comes to reduction in recovery time objectives, we have not used it in that way. However, we are anticipating that our recovery time objectives will come down from over a month to hours or days. Recovery point objectives will also effectively be down to hours. It is hard to say how much it has freed up IT resources for other projects or tasks. Now that it is fully implemented and fully working, we are spending a lot less time looking after it. It has drastically reduced the amount of time we used to spend on backups. It is hard to provide the metrics, but six hours a month or something like that would be fair. The ransomware recoverability feature has definitely helped with our data protection mandates. It has reassured our security teams that we are in a good place with regard to securing the data and being able to recover the data.
Rajesh Sudini - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise storage system that offers consistent stability and data security
The replication capability and data security have been the most valuable features When retrieving data from the replication of remote sites, it does not give you immediate results. The RPO and RTO rates could be improved.  We have been using this solution for three and a half years. This is a…

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."
"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 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's instantaneous and redundant file replication, available across multiple geographical locations, ensures easy and user-friendly recovery."
"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."
"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."
"The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is a hybrid solution that supports both on-premises and cloud environments."
"Oracle ZFS is very fast and it is efficient. It has outperformed any hardware array controller that I've ever come across. With Oracle ZFS on my NAS, which is running five, four terabyte drives, when I've had a drive failure and changed one out, it'll rebuild that array in two hours, or maybe less. When you think you're rebuilding almost four terabytes of data redundancy, that's pretty good using an old AMD Turion hardware, that's nothing to complain about."
"It is not necessarily for the fastest storage or cluster storage, but just for pure storage, it's really hard to beat. It's just been around as long as anything else."
"The replication capability and data security have been the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"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."
"More monitoring from the platform would be good. There is some monitoring, but it is paid. It is a chargeable service. It would be good for that to be included in the base."
"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 new Edge filer that they have comes with a lot more features than what we purchased. It would be better if we are able to add those extra features without having to swap out the hardware. A clear upgrade path for legacy customers would be beneficial."
"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."
"It has a learning curve."
"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."
"When retrieving data from the replication of remote sites, it does not give you immediate results. The RPO and RTO rates could be improved."
"ZFS is great for just mass storage, but if you're trying to make fast storage – something like a SAN-type delivery network where you wanted to do any type of RAM disc over the network – it falls flat. ZFS does not do that. It is kind of limiting."
"Oracle ZFS does what I've asked it to do, and it has done it very efficiently. The only time I'm running into issues is with Proxmox. If I run ZFS drives, I find my RAM usage is very high. However, I don't have that problem with the TrueNAS system, where I'm running an old N36 Turion with four gigabytes of RAM, and that's running 24/7. There have been no issues with such a low-powered environment there, it works fine, but with Proxmox it seems to go slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File System Software solutions are best for your needs.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
68%
Educational Organization
4%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Retailer
3%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Educational Organization
10%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise1
 

Questions from the Community

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?
There’s an issue with permissions, they aren’t always as transparent for customers as Microsoft’s, for example. Integrations with AI could also be improved, and error messages should be clearer, mo...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
CTERA connected us with Bezeq, which is a communications company in Israel that also sells similar solutions, and we also set up a portal. We were then Bezeq's integrator, until Bezeq decided to st...
What needs improvement with Oracle ZFS?
From my experience, we consumers will only ask for one thing from Oracle ZFS: cost improvements. Regarding the cost, making it 50 percent less would be beneficial, as it cannot be free.
What is your primary use case for Oracle ZFS?
Our main use case for Oracle ZFS is that it's just normal storage for the entire infrastructure, so we have our systems connected to it.
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle ZFS?
Oracle ZFS is easy to scale; you can just get the modules and add them to increase the capacity, and that's it. It's just seamless. To summarize, I can advise those who want to use Oracle ZFS to co...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ZFS
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Specialized Bicycle Components Inc., Hospital AlemÊo Oswaldo Cruz, DB Schenker Rail, Asia Commercial Bank, First Alliance Bank Zambia Limited, Ricoh Company Ltd., CyberSolutions Inc., NARA INSTITUTE of SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY, SunGard Availability Services, B&H PhotoVideo,
Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Oracle ZFS and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.