No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs VMware vSAN comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
CTERA Platform offers 60-80% cost savings through automation, reduced headcount, and enhanced storage efficiency despite initial costs.
Sentiment score
3.2
VMware vSAN reduces hardware costs, increases efficiency, and boosts ROI despite high operational expenses and upfront costs.
It reduced the amount of time IT spent maintaining multiple systems, which let the team focus on higher-value projects.
Member Technical at ADP
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
Starting with a smaller infrastructure and scaling as required allows us to save costs initially.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have seen a return on investment; it's satisfactory in the long run.
Deputy Manager at Mannai
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
CTERA support team is highly rated for responsiveness, expertise, personalized service, despite occasional delays and ticket creation needs.
Sentiment score
4.9
VMware vSAN support is knowledgeable but response times vary, with resources helping reduce direct contact needs for clients.
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
For critical issues, we receive a call within 10 to 15 minutes of creating a request.
Senior Associate at Iron Mountain Incorporated
I would rate their support nine points.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I am not satisfied with VMware support, particularly with the reaction times, SLAs, and those kinds of issues.
private cloud team at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Sometimes the issue is that you don't get the best experience, whether it's the response time or first-level support quality.
Deputy Manager at Mannai
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
CTERA's platform is scalable and adaptable, offering easy management and supporting global use with flexible licensing options.
Sentiment score
4.8
VMware vSAN offers seamless scalability, enabling efficient node addition and storage expansion to meet evolving business capacity demands.
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
The licensing supports various data sizes, such as EV16 supporting up to 16 terabytes, and if you exceed that, you move to EV32.
Senior Associate at Iron Mountain Incorporated
CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It supports up to 64 nodes in a cluster, allowing us to add nodes and expand the cluster as needed.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
If you have already bought it, you need specific servers, and it is easier with a SAN.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is stable with minor sync issues, improved reliability, and occasional user-induced disruptions.
Sentiment score
5.9
VMware vSAN reliability improves with updates, strong support, and adherence to hardware compatibility lists, ensuring stable performance.
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
In terms of stability, I give VMware vSAN nine points.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
From my perspective, I would rate VMware vSAN's stability as extremely high, perhaps a nine.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Room For Improvement

The CTERA platform needs UI improvements, better performance, enhanced integration, and expanded documentation with comprehensive logging and monitoring features.
VMware vSAN requires better management tools, integration, and hardware support, with improved stability, scalability, and enhanced disaster recovery features.
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
Better visibility into what's happening behind the scenes, cleaner reporting, and simpler policy management would make it feel more effortless at scale.
Member Technical at ADP
A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features.
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Discussing the pricing model is significant as Broadcom creates many discussions worldwide regarding pricing.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

CTERA offers cost-effective, flexible licensing with minimal hardware needs, valued for clear invoicing, outpacing competitors like Nasuni and IBM.
VMware vSAN offers long-term savings, but initial costs and licensing complexity concern small businesses, especially post-Broadcom acquisition.
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
From what I heard from my seniors, a 50 TB capacity license would be around 55 to 60 lakhs in Indian rupees.
Graduate Engineering Trainee at HCLSoftware
This has resulted in a slight cost increase.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

CTERA offers scalable, secure file management and collaboration, supporting on-premises and cloud environments with efficient user-friendly features.
VMware vSAN provides high-performance, scalable storage with cost-effective integration, using existing hardware and offering advanced features.
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
When it comes to data protection in CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, we have encryption methodologies and we also have ransomware protection, which is a wide variety of features offered along with the CTERA appliance and application.
Senior Associate at Iron Mountain Incorporated
Hot add features are available by default in vSphere, allowing us to immediately increase memory, CPU, and hard drive without any downtime.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The performance is excellent, handling workloads better than direct-attached or legacy storage solutions.
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
The VMware vSAN feature that has had the greatest impact on operational efficiency is the basic software-defined storage functionality.
Deputy Manager at Mannai
 

Categories and Ranking

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (1st), NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Storage (2nd), Cloud Backup (7th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (5th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (6th), AI Legal & Compliance (2nd)
VMware vSAN
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
HCI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is designed for File System Software and holds a mindshare of 14.9%, up 10.4% compared to last year.
VMware vSAN, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 7.7% mindshare, down 14.0% since last year.
File System Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform14.9%
Nasuni15.9%
Panzura CloudFS11.2%
Other58.0%
File System Software
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSAN7.7%
VxRail9.6%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)8.9%
Other73.8%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

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.
ShyamikaThamel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance
VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which File System Software solutions are best for your needs.
911,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
38%
Outsourcing Company
29%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Construction Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business102
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise135
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
Pricing for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is subscription-based, and licensing appears flexible and environment-dependent. It can be licensed for hosted data services or private deploymen...
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
A few improvements would be more granular reporting, a simpler initial setup, and a smoother admin experience for edge cases. It would also help if troubleshooting and policy management were a litt...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
My main use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is replacing or modernizing legacy file storage and giving remote teams secure access to shared files across locations. I am using it to...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vSAN
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA, Panzura, Nasuni and others in File System Software. Updated: August 2026.
911,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.