CTERA Intelligent Data Platform Reviews

The main use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is to ensure that employees working for the client I have been contracting with have access to all saved files. In my day-to-day work, I rely most on CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to access files through the private cloud my client has been using.

A specific example of how my team uses CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to access files is that instead of Microsoft, my client depends upon CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform. We have a private cloud where we save all the files, so if a person has a new workstation and wants to ensure they are accessing the files they generally have access to, CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comes into view. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the platform we use to access the files in the cloud. To clarify, if a person is working for a certain agency, they will have a shared workgroup that everyone uses. Everybody saves files in the same workgroup, which we access using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform. Once the workstation is customized, if they experience issues with file synchronization or access problems, we step in and use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to resolve those issues for them.

There are many ways we use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for various functions, including fetching profiles, rebuilding profiles, restoring files, undeleting, or mass undeleting files. Essentially, everything revolves around file access, which is the main objective of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

I have been personally using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for a long time, and I feel that the best feature is the ease at which we can provide services to the employees of the company, especially in rebuilding profiles or restoring or deleting necessary or unnecessary files. All of this can be easily performed on the platform, which I feel is the best feature.

The profile rebuilding feature of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform stands out compared to other platforms I have used because with other platforms, I would have to go to multiple sites and ensure access, then return to build and sync the profile into the workstation. However, with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, it is straightforward. We just ensure all details are inputted correctly into the main platform when a person is onboarded, and once the requests are raised, we simply go to the directory services option in CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and click to fetch the user, which makes the whole process very easy.

When it comes to mass undeleting in CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, it is a process where we restore files that are deleted by mistake. It is generally used when people delete some files unintentionally, but with a mass undeleting script, we restore all files deleted by a specific workgroup or folders in the cloud for the last six months. It is not easy to lose a file when we use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform because even if it is lost, it can be restored easily. This is especially helpful when people change their laptops or when files are accidentally lost. Sometimes people do not check if their workstations are synced properly, and they mistakenly mess up with the files. There have also been situations where a whole office has lost thousands of files, and with the help of the mass undeletions script, we can restore everything quickly, just a few clicks away, because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is that automated. Restoration is also straightforward; if a person can provide the file name or location and a tentative date when they last accessed the file, I can restore it for them with just a few steps. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is so automated that I can handle these tasks easily on my own.

Regarding automation and ease of use in CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, while we currently have all the automations we need, I believe there is room for more improvements. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers a broad platform, so the scope for further automation is large. In terms of ease of use, it is user-friendly, but we need to ensure users are well-trained on how to save files properly within a workgroup when using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and how to keep everything synced. The only issue I face is that we give many rules to employees, and not everyone remembers all of them. Aside from that, everything is good.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform does not have a noticeable positive impact or a specific outcome that I have observed. It is as useful as any other cloud service but perhaps with more limitations, especially when compared to public clouds in Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, where there are fewer user education requirements. However, I do support CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform in scenarios where a private cloud is essential over a public or hybrid cloud.

The limitations I have observed while using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform mainly revolve around access. For instance, if there are numerous agencies in my client company, each workgroup is assigned a specific agent number, and users must follow specific orders to save files. Sometimes users mistakenly save, which messes up synchronization. We do not have a catch for this problem, so we must educate users on proper file saving practices. The second limitation is a loss of functionality regarding access confidentiality, where staff under agents used to have restricted file access, but that feature is no longer available. This makes maintaining file confidentiality challenging.

To improve CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, it is crucial to implement features that allow better access controls; this would greatly benefit not just my client but many corporates worldwide looking to keep files organized while limiting access.

I have been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for two years.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is not as stable as a corporate would prefer. We have faced multiple issues in the past year, including a performance problem that took three to four months to resolve with the vendor. This incident led to a backlog of thousands of tickets for the team managing CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, and it took us more than four months to clear the queue and assist users in the organization.

I do not think CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform can handle growth or increased workloads easily because we faced such issues around nine months ago, where it took three to four months for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to provide a resolution, followed by additional months to stabilize the system again within the organization.

I would rate customer support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as neutral because we have not always had good support. There have been times when they lagged considerably, making the overall experience neutral; while we had swift resolutions at times, there were long waits on other occasions.

The client I work for has been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform from the beginning and did not use any other platform before this.

Before choosing CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, the organization evaluated other options but found them unsuitable due to confidentiality concerns related to being a public cloud, leading them to select CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

I can definitely say that there is considerable time savings with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform compared to traditional approaches for file access and saving. Additionally, the staff required for file access issues is significantly reduced; we manage with a small team of just ten people, which eases the financial burden on the organization.

We use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to implement a cloud storage in the company and share data using NFS and SMB.

We use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for the simulation jobs. There are people working in different sites. We use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to share the metadata of their simulations to different sites around the world using the Wasabi Cloud.

All the file services for the company are going to be migrated to CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform infrastructure.

The best features CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers in my experience include the possibility to work with cache using only the metadata. That way we are saving space.

Users are able to work with multiple environments at the same time, including SMB and NFS, which has improved our data management significantly.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is improving the way we manage data in the company. The main idea of this is to save money.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform can be improved in the area of monitoring. Monitoring is complicated because they are offering only a secondary tool and we cannot monitor all of the settings in a centralized way.

Sometimes bugs appear when a new patch is released, which is another area that could make monitoring or management easier for our team.

Regarding CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's AI capabilities, it has some features for security, and specifically cybersecurity, but it can be improved.

My impressions of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's file replication and versioning are that it is useful. The versioning allows a way to recover data like a snapshot, and the file replication is not always the best depending on the Edge Filer location, but it is good and that is an area to improve.

We started the implementation of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform in January 2024.

We analyzed other options before choosing CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, particularly Nasuni.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is highly scalable. We can extend the metrics and the only needed thing is the license.

The customer support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is rated 9 over 10.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the customer support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as 9 over 10.

I have not used a solution CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform before; we were using old-fashioned file servers.

We have not used the disaster recovery option or feature for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform in this case.

We have assigned a couple of team members to use and deploy CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform tool and be the administrator. In this case, we have not improved other people's activities.

I don't know if we have seen a return on investment with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform. I would say that the people in the different locations are thinking less about on-premises devices. Everything is going to the cloud.

We analyzed Nasuni.

My advice to others looking into using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is that a TAM is needed when you are working on new features or when you have critical topics before they release the infrastructure on your environment.

For me, CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 9 over 10, so we are happy with them. I would rate this review an 8.

My main use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is related to a database shrinking and rebuilding activity that we recently performed.

The best features of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform include significant scalability in Edge Filer, especially where we use cloud object storage. It provides massive scalability. Another key feature is robust data protection that CTERA offers, and it provides us a unified global file system.

For robust data protection, CTERA provides continuous data protection and cloud-native backup. Regarding metadata, it provides a very converged solution for metadata and an immutable archive along with a cross-region converged solution for robust data protection. In the disaster recovery component, it provides a unique feature for metadata disaster recovery, allowing for fast retrieval of our critical files. Regarding scalability, CTERA offers unlimited capacity scaling at low-cost cloud storage, which reduces our storage costs and enables seamless tiering of our cold data to object storage.

Another advantage is that CTERA provides us a reduction in our IT cost and consolidation of our legacy infrastructure. CTERA has replaced multiple legacy hardware stacks including NAS, backup, and file servers. This is a very unique feature that eliminates our NAS branch for our client and provides a single platform for file storage where we can sync, share, and backup.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has improved our operations tremendously by eliminating our NAS branch and providing a single platform for our file storage where we can sync, share, and backup our runtime data.

There needs to be improvements, particularly regarding real-time sync conflict resolution and cloud latency. Sometimes I face issues in real-time sync conflict as well as latency in the cloud.

If CTERA could automate its migration component and provide it in a utility way, that would be great. Additionally, there are a few other features that could improve my overall experience.

We were also facing performance issues in our CTERA environment, and after diagnosing various scenarios and use cases that users shared, we found that all of them were experiencing slowness in our Edge Filer. During diagnosis, we discovered that our database size had increased significantly. Although CTERA itself provides an automated service called CTERA vacuum, we found that a manual database vacuum activity needed to be performed on our Postgres database. We recently performed this manual CTERA database vacuum activity, and it helped tremendously. It resolved the intermittent slowness issue that we were experiencing for several customers and multiple CTERA Edge Filers.

We checked our audit logs and Edge Filer logs to identify the root cause. Initially, we observed that it appeared to be related to network issues, but after thoroughly checking our logs, we discovered that the issue was related to a delay in our services where our Edge Filers and application servers were reaching the database. We checked our database very thoroughly, reviewed all the logs, and identified the problem. During this process, we performed all CTERA vacuum activities, which helped significantly. I can provide more details if needed.

Regarding handling the issue on the Edge Filer side, the major issue recently has been the database component. On a day-to-day basis, we encounter performance issues in our Edge Filer where some of our Edge Filers experience network issues, resulting in higher response times. In one scenario, we moved our traffic from the physical Edge Filer to the local Edge Filer. We observed trouble with our local Edge Filer in that case, and we routed our traffic to the physical Edge Filer instead.

I have been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for the past six years.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is stable.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's scalability is very good.

Regarding customer support, CTERA offers very good support. They assign a dedicated engineer for our account, and we can reach out to our account manager directly. In case of daily operational issues, we usually raise CTERA support tickets, and we receive exceptional support from them.

Positive

I previously used AWS file share services for another client, and now for my current client, I am using CTERA. When comparing it with my previous client, the best aspect of CTERA is that it supports a multi-cloud environment, unlike before where I was only concerned with one cloud.

I only evaluated AWS file share services.

CTERA has been a major improvement with a reduction in our storage and infrastructure cost, achieving up to eighty percent reduction in storage costs overall, which is significant.

For those considering using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, I advise comparing it with NetApp, Nasuni, and Panzura, as CTERA stands out in terms of providing services and support. There are many use cases across various sectors where CTERA can be utilized, including banking, healthcare, and all remote sites. CTERA combines cloud-scale storage, edge performance, and intelligent data management with a unified platform.

In CTERA, we usually deal with application patching, new changes that need to be implemented, and overall maintenance of our application structure. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has positively impacted our organization's security posture by effectively offering user endpoint deduplication, continuous data protection, and multi-cloud replication.

CTERA Intelligent Data Platform serves as our main file share. We have designated filers, which are the servers that users use as a share. We have designed our CTERA Intelligent Data Platform system with failover capability, which means it has a primary path and a secondary path, with the primary path being active. If the primary path is disabled or shut down, the secondary path takes over. This is how our CTERA Intelligent Data Platform infrastructure works, primarily for file share and migration.

CTERA Intelligent Data Platform has made it easier to design and deploy a new file share when a client or user needs an additional drive, access, or share. This ease of deployment has resulted in noticeable improvements, including database, CTERA, and application servers, which are necessary for the file share to work.

The best feature that CTERA Intelligent Data Platform offers is that it is easy to design or designate a filer to a specific number of users, and you can also enable the DFS, which provides additional security for end users.

The DFS feature secures the original path, meaning users do not know the actual path and only use the DFS path. For filer assignment, we have a designated filer for production and non-production.

Regarding permissions and access management, we have a security group for that.

I cannot think of any improvements for CTERA Intelligent Data Platform; I believe its file shares are among the best, followed by the Cohesity data platform. I have used other network-attached storage, and this is much better compared to Cohesity SmartFiles.

I would suggest a more user-friendly interface as a needed improvement, even if it is something small or a wish list feature.

I have been using CTERA Intelligent Data Platform for six months.

CTERA Intelligent Data Platform is stable.

The scalability of CTERA Intelligent Data Platform is excellent; you can easily deploy a server in VMware and integrate it with CTERA Intelligent Data Platform.

Customer support for CTERA Intelligent Data Platform is always available and helpful, and the TAM team is quick as well.

I previously used Cohesity SmartFiles from my last company before switching to CTERA Intelligent Data Platform.

The steps involved in migrating existing file shares or network-attached storage data to CTERA Intelligent Data Platform include having security groups that can copy accesses.

I have seen a return on investment, as CTERA Intelligent Data Platform offers the ability to expand shares.

Overall, I rate CTERA Intelligent Data Platform an 8.5 out of 10. I chose 8.5 for my rating because I believe if it had an easier user interface, it would be much better than Cohesity, and that is the only improvement I can think of.

I advise others looking into using CTERA Intelligent Data Platform to compare what they need. For large infrastructures with massive end-users, I would recommend CTERA Intelligent Data Platform. However, for a medium number of end-users, switching to Cohesity could be considered. For pricing, CTERA Intelligent Data Platform is much less expensive compared to Cohesity, which offers many services but can only accommodate medium end-users since not everything is compatible with Cohesity.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's main use case is SMB services. I use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for SMB services in my work to save and complete our work while storing files. For our main use case, I use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for saving as a NAS solution to store the files.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers excellent features with simple architecture. The platform includes cloud platforms, gateways, and portals that are straightforward for my organization to use.

The user interface of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is very simple to use. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has positively impacted my organization by being straightforward to use, and since its introduction five years ago, my team has experienced no downtimes.

The lack of downtime with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has helped my organization by ensuring that each upgrade I perform does not affect the systems and the servers.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform can be improved, but I consider it to be good overall. The upgrades of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform could be somewhat more stable.

I have been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for 1.5 years.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is stable, as I am not experiencing many issues.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is really scalable.

The customer support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is really good, and the engineers are highly qualified. They help me every time I face any issue.

Positive

I previously used SAN solutions, such as EMC, and I switched to CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform due to my use case for file services.

The learning curve for my employees with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform was really easy to implement, and it was very quick. The migration was also very smooth.

I have seen a return on investment with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, as the automation is very good, which reduces the headcount, saves money, and saves time.

My recovery time has improved by about 50% with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, as I can restore a deleted or modified file within a few seconds from the portal.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is that it is value for money and the setup is easy.

Before choosing CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, I checked many solutions, but CTERA was the best.

I recommend everyone to use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as it is really stable, versatile, and it does not have much downtime—it is perfect.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is really good, and I would suggest CTERA to every company that is looking for a similar solution. I gave this review a rating of 10.

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 stop the activity with this product, from the beginning of 2025. Bezeq customers who want to continue working on the product go to us, we have our own portal as well.

Over the years, CTERA has shifted its focus away from local and cloud backup, concentrating instead on the file server with smart storage, HFILER, and caching mode, which we are aligned with. We have continued to deploy backup, archiving, and other complementary solutions on top of CTERA’s platform.

Since we have a big cloud environment, we back it up to CTERA’S portal and we use its archive.

CTERA first took that direction 4-5 years ago. My relationship with CTERA is around 17 years old and every time a new version comes out or additional features are released, they update me. You could say we are their BETA SITE here in Israel. It’s been rewarding to expand our capabilities together throughout the years. I look at it that way because a lot of times they send me information and ask for my thoughts.

We are CTERA’s main exclusive partner integrator in Israel, in the world of SMB. There are other companies with which we are also in contact, but they are more interested in the enterprise market, like Binat, which works with CTERA but with Enterprise customers. We also have a channel with them for business, where we are the executive arm.

Over the years, we have acquired a great deal of knowledge with CTERA, whether it’s with the portal, if it’s on the side of end customers, or with migration.

In regards to our main use cases would be migration from legacy storage such as Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM CALLSTORAGE. It’s a traditional file storage that we use with CTERA’s tools and our tools. A migration to CTERA’s environment happens when a client has a small file server in his office and has a big portal behind him. So we connect him, if he has different branches, or work-from-home scenarios or international users.

CTERA is a company that continually evolves with the latest modernization and technology. Its solution is built to handle ransomware and is strongly security-oriented, which is what I appreciate most about it. The fact that the U.S. Department of Defense and major enterprises in the U.S. have adopted this product speaks volumes. The company’s roots trace back to Check Point, giving it a strong foundation in security-first thinking. In recent years, ransomware attacks have become increasingly common, and CTERA has integrated anti-ransomware capabilities directly into its product, well before you even need additional defenses like EDR or XDR. To me, this makes it a fantastic solution that ensures the files you’re working on remain safe and protected.

Even in cases where companies have suffered ransomware attacks and turned to us for help, CTERA has proven to make the recovery process significantly faster than any other solution I’ve seen. There’s no need for elaborate reconstructions, files are safeguarded in the portal, ensuring business continuity from day zero. Once the issue is identified, operations can resume immediately. Our experience shows that CTERA is constantly advancing its solutions, and now, with the growing trend of AI integration, they are adopting it in an optimal way.

Another important advantage is volume reduction. CTERA allows us to maintain consistent pricing for our customers by optimizing storage. In the past, when storage was full, we felt compelled to purchase more. Today, with the ability to archive workloads securely in the cloud, where they remain accessible at all times, there’s no need to worry about constantly expanding on-premises server capacity.

In the cloud-based world, CTERA provides a significant advantage. For example, at RealTime, we deliver cloud services to our customers, and when a customer requires a file server, we deploy a small one in the cloud. Since cloud storage disks are expensive, CTERA’s smart archiving allows us to keep only what’s necessary on the live server while moving the bulk of the data into efficient archive storage, cutting costs substantially.

Instead of storing an entire 10-terabyte dataset on costly SSD disks, we only need to store about 500 gigabytes. The full 10 terabytes remain accessible in CTERA’s portal, at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional cloud servers.

One of the biggest advantages of CTERA is the ability to reduce a customer’s storage costs while eliminating the need to worry about backups or infrastructure after migration. This directly lowers IT expenses, and because the cloud enables limitless scalability, customers can continue to grow without concern for infrastructure limitations.

Ransomware protection is another key benefit. With CTERA’s security tools, I can confidently assure customers that their data is safe from ransomware threats. And even in the rare event of an attack, recovery is far faster compared to other solutions. These capabilities set CTERA apart from competitors in the market.

CTERA also offers a unique on-site solution that is especially valuable for companies with multiple branches. It is far superior to platforms like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive, because it simplifies user access management and provides localized support. Unlike large vendors such as Microsoft, where customers are often routed to remote support engineers who may not fully understand the issue. CTERA delivers VIP-level support in the customer’s own language. This combination of business continuity, simplicity, and personal support is every company’s dream.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform helped free up IT resources for other projects or tasks. In the past we deployed and maintained our own systems, and I did not realize how much time and resources that took until Oded advised me to migrate to Azure. That's when I realized how much time it freed me up to develop the business and introduce other solutions.

This was a great solution and part of RealTime’s philosophy, we looked for a “set-and-forget” solution instead of continuously chasing support. Today, things have become simpler. The solution works and executes much better, and it frees up time to deal with other things and introduce additional activities.

Overall, there has been a time saving of between 30% and 40%, which is a lot, since RealTime doesn’t only deal with CTERA but also with cloud services, interterminal customers, Microsoft 365, integrations, and upgrade

Ransom Protect has helped us reduce downtime by 90%. In trials, we saw that it was able to prevent data intrusion and encryption. Even before implementing this feature, recovery time was fast, users were back to work in less than two hours.

We hear from other companies not working with us that recovery can take one to two weeks. With CTERA, we have seen a 90% reduction in time for file storage recovery.

I have a really good impression of CTERA’s Enterprise File Services Platform for file replication and versioning. It works properly both locally and in the cloud portal. Any customer who requests their retention policy according to their requirements is able to receive the data, and we can deliver the results they want in just a matter of minutes.

We used CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for disaster recovery. This saved us about 90% of time because, as soon as a customer experiences a file server crash while using CTERA, we can bring them a new machine, synchronize it to the cloud, and within an hour or two, the metadata is delivered correctly. The customer can see their files and get back to work.

There was one case with a large accounting company that had close to four million small files, totaling 3–4 terabytes. I told my employees to pay special attention to it. Our technician brought a machine to their office, accessed the data, started the synchronization, and within three hours everything was back.

If this were an old traditional Windows file server, this would’ve taken us at least 24 hours until the systems would be back up and running.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform helped reduce our recovery point objectives.

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, more detailed, and less general.

Another area for improvement is simultaneous file editing. I understand a fix is in progress, but it hasn’t been released yet. 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. I would like to see functionality similar to Microsoft OneDrive, where you can immediately see if someone else is editing the same file.

It’s a very stable platform.

It’s very easy to scale, there weren’t any complaints from our customers.

They have improved a lot. I would rate them an 8 out of ten.

Positive

Deploying CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform into your organization’s firewall was not complicated at all.

After my company does the implementation and trains the employees, it’s very smooth, we don’t get any complaints. There are always questions and casual glitches but not anything that’s out of the ordinary.

We ourselves are CTERA’s main integrator in Israel. We acquired the knowledge ourselves. We did it in-house.

The investment I made on CTERA through Azure was returned within two years.

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 often explain that the market here is different and requires more creativity. In some cases, prices need to be adjusted downward. I understand the business side, of course, CTERA needs to make a profit but this is still an area for improvement.

When you sell a solution with all the benefits we’ve discussed, but the cost is high, some customers compare it to free or bundled alternatives. For example, companies that purchase a Microsoft 365 license automatically receive OneDrive without paying anything extra. In my opinion, CTERA’s pricing should be more proportional and accessible so that cost is not the factor preventing customers from purchasing.

If there was an improvement in the price, at least in our region, it would be easier for us to sell it and it would be easier to develop it and increase revenue. It is worth the price. The benefits I receive, the defense I receive, the fact that my data is there make it worth it, but not everyone sees it that way, which is the difficulty.

At first, the learning curve was much more complicated. I was the one who learned the technology and pushed it forward. It was not easy. But over the years, the solution has evolved, and implementation has become simpler. Whenever we need to implement something or run into difficulties, we get all the support we need from CTERA, their team is always there to accompany us. Today, everything is much easier than it was a few years ago.

I would rate CTERA a nine out of ten.

We use CTERA as a global file share for several divisions within our organization.

We immediately realized the benefits of the CTERA platform. When we rolled this out, we had around five sites and noticed a significant drop in requests for restoration or storage space increases. On the backup side, we no longer had to back up Windows Servers. 

Using CTERA has freed up our IT resources from monitoring the old Windows file servers, adding space, cleaning up stuff, etc. 

Having backups has reduced the tasks administrators used to do, and now they can concentrate on other things.

We use CTERA for disaster recovery at sites in hurricane zones. Our DR nodes are located in the central US, and it has worked well for those disasters. We've also had appliances crash and recovered them faster than using a regular Windows file server. 

We've reduced our recovery point objectives to varying degrees. It depends on the site. We can typically have a system back up and serving users for small to medium sites in eight hours.

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 replication and versioning work great. Users can self-serve basic restorations of one or two gigabytes, but administrators need to handle bigger restores of several gigabytes. CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities. It sends the data to the cloud. 

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. We haven't used Ransom Protect, but we'll roll that out with the next firmware upgrade.

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 could make it easier for administrators to troubleshoot problems. We get alerts, and sometimes, those are false positives. Compared to where we started, they've made significant improvements in the last five years.

I have been using CTERA for five years.

I rate CTERA nine out of 10 for stability. It has been reliable for our needs.

I rate CTERA eight out of 10 for scalability with a qualification. It's scalable, but their licensing model is different on their devices. If we're running the system on our on-premise kit, the licensing should be per terabyte and not a limitation on CPU and memory. 

If we need to upgrade CPU and memory, we should be able to do that without a license upgrade. I get that we need to upgrade our storage space if we run out, but we should be able to scale up processing and memory based on the system's needs. 

I rate CTERA support eight out of 10. High-priority issues are handled promptly, while lower-priority concerns take longer to address. 

Positive

When we implemented the solution, CTERA didn't have any training, so we had to work with their engineers to learn the solution and get the portal set up. It was a little challenging, but they were there to answer questions and show us best practices for deployment.

It took us around a month to set up the portal and work through the pieces to deploy the edge services. Once you deploy the edge device, you need to copy the old systems' data. That takes a little bit longer. It took about two months to get it to a place where we were comfortable. The deployment team consisted of one CTERA engineer, me, and another system administrator.

After deployment, CTERA requires some maintenance, primarily firmware upgrades. CTERA coordinates with us when new versions come out, and we work with their engineers to deploy them. A technical account manager manages those software versions to ensure we're not on the bleeding edge and causing more problems in our environment. 

They do ESS upgrades on the hardware they deploy from and other care and feeding underneath the hood that we can't access. They have access to their gateways, which are locked down only for their admin use. We open tickets and work with them hand in hand to get things upgraded, tweaked, or troubleshooted.

We did not use any third parties; the deployment was handled by one CTERA engineer, myself, and another administrator.

We reduced our total ownership cost using CTERA. Adding SSD storage to Windows file servers is expensive, and we no longer need to back up those devices. The ability to store things in a back-end S3 bucket significantly reduces the cost. It's much cheaper per gig. 

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 rate CTERA Enterprise File Services nine out of 10. 

Before implementing CTERA, you must analyze the workload you're trying to put on the platform and test it. We're a big manufacturer doing a lot of automated testing where we're writing thousands of files. At a point, it doesn't stop you from writing files, but the directory lookups become a little slower. It's critical to understand your workload before you put it there. The regular stuff works great, like Excel, Word, etc., but you want to check if it will be appropriate for your purposes if you are doing automated manufacturing or engineering.

My main use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is that it serves as our primary file server.

A specific example of how I use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as my primary file server is that users map to it instead of a local onsite file server, and it backs the data up to the cloud for high availability and restorability.

The best features CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers are that it is easy for users to restore files, and I was able to restore a large number of files and identify them.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has positively impacted my organization in that it works as a file server, and centralizing things makes managing them in one location simpler than managing them everywhere else.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform can be improved. I believe we have experienced some file server instability over the years working with this product, which seems to have gotten better, but unfortunately, we appear to be upgrading frequently to chase issues. At times, I do feel as though I am a beta tester.

The instability in CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform seems to be on the management side for the most part. Files have been accessible and the users themselves have not been impacted, but it does seem to take considerable effort to keep it updated and to chase upgrades and firmware. I do spend more time with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform than I have with other file servers.

I have been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for four years.

In my experience, CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is not stable. I would say we have experienced a large number of issues, some of which were on our network side and some of which are bugs in CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform systems.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's scalability seems simple to add and scale out.

The support team that I have worked with is excellent. They are great in helping resolve problems and other issues, which has been very helpful. However, it would be nice if I talked to them less.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's customer support is the best part of the product. The support group that I have worked with has been absolutely amazing. Every one of them deserves a perfect rating, and the issues that we faced are not their fault. They have been great in helping me work through the problems. My biggest complaint about reaching out to support is that you cannot call and get somebody. The people that answer the phone send you directly back to the web page to open a ticket and will not do it for you.

Positive

Previously, we used typical Windows file servers. A business decision was made to consolidate into a cloud-based file service.

I would assess my employees' learning curve for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as ongoing. We are still onboarding things as we move forward. We just started an upgrade in October that we were able to finish this week, so it took us five months to upgrade the back end of this system, which seems lengthy.

My impressions of the data protection offered by CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform are that so far, we have not lost any data, which seems to be working well.

I would assess CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's impact overall on my organization's security posture as having caused no change.

I am not saving time with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

We use CTERA in almost every site we use. It is the platform for every commercial site that we have in the world. We have around 198 of their devices locally, and we also have CTERA devices in our central locations for each region.

Even though we have added additional devices throughout the four years, we have been able to do that and cover it 24/7 throughout the world with four resources. CTERA can make it easier on your staff in that respect. When it is deployed and connected with proper Active Directory and bandwidth, and things are moving properly, you do not need to touch it. You do not need to do a lot. That is the nice part of 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. 

For the technical side, they have done a very good job over the last couple of years. Joe, Mukesh, and Shannon have done a great job teaching our staff. Joe Scott comes across as almost like a professor when he is teaching. He is very good at it. Once you learn how the system works, it is fairly easy, but there are a lot of little things that can go wrong. There are a lot of moving parts within it, so a lot of things can happen. You can do all the right steps and follow the runbook that is provided by CTERA, but you still need CTERA to help you dig down deep when you find an issue because new ones happen all the time.

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. For example, if we do identify an issue, where could we use those logs? We have to download a specific log that only goes to them for them to review. We have no insight into it even if it is something that is on our side or our issue. I would like to have more visibility into that.

File replication-wise, they do a good job, but I would like to see a little bit more on folders. If somebody has touched a folder and moved it, I would like a little bit more details on that. We have certain folders for specific sites. Some people have access to them, and suddenly, a folder disappears. It could be because operations deleted it or moved it, maybe accidentally within another folder. There should be logs that we could go back to and see when those file folders were moved or touched and have an idea. Right now, we do not have this information. It is a big search if we lose a file or the operations team deletes a folder with scanned images in it. We do not get a log that says that so and so in operations touched this and hit the delete button. Such information is essential for doing RCAs when we have issues like that.

It does a very good job with data protection, but I would like some additional logs. I would like some additional ability to see who touched the folders. We have to let operations be able to touch certain folders because of the way our system is developed. Unfortunately, within CTERA, we do not have those logs. I would love to have those logs. If we turned on additional logging, it would fill it up so quickly that we would not be able to maintain and have enough storage. That is our issue. I would like to see additional logging available that did not occupy so much of our storage space so that we could see when somebody touched a folder and moved it. That would give us the last little piece to ensure that our data security is optimal.

It would be nice if there was an intermediary between HC400s and going bigger, something that would allow additional storage or even add storage to the HC400s, which recurrently cannot do. We have smaller scanning sites that use a physical device. These physical devices have very limited storage, so we end up running out of storage at times. There is no real alternative without going to a larger scale in three-node Nutanix and blowing up the site, and it may not be ready for it. It would be nice if there was an intermediary between the HC400s and going bigger. We should be able to have additional storage or even add storage to the HC400s when we get to that point where we are low and we do not have much storage on that HC400. It is not a large device. There are only three and a half terabytes. Once that storage is gone, you cannot add any more unless you club another HC400 with it or go to a bigger device. Clubbing an HC400 is a lot more hassle than it is worth.

I have been using the solution for over four years.

Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues. We had things deployed for years, and we were suddenly getting cloud sync issues that were crashing our sites. When it took the site down, we had to physically rebuild the actual disk and then download the data. It caused us a lot of pain from the standpoint of working through it. It required a lot of copying of images. It was a lot of work for us on our end. They worked through it. Shannon did a good job of keeping us abreast of what was going on and the steps they were taking to resolve. It took a little bit longer than what we wanted, and we had several more cloud sync issues, but, eventually, they came out with a new version to deploy. That seems to have taken care of the issue.

They do a very good job with scalability. CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow. The smaller HC400 devices do not scale well if placed in a site on the cusp of needing a larger setup, but everything else that CTERA has product-wise does very well.

We use the ticketing system regularly, and it works well. It has gotten better over time. When I first started, we would contact them a lot by phone for P1s or severity ones. I found that to be very cumbersome and less reliable, but since then, we have been able to work through those issues. By having Joe, Mukesh, and Shannon, we have been able to resolve some of those issues. If we supply a ticket, they are able to find a way to help us. We sometimes do call. We can now also get on the calendar and schedule time. That is a nice feature. When we first started out, everything was on call, and those people we were calling did not have a clue of what they were doing. That has changed a lot over the last four years.

They have also done a good job recently from the training aspect. Joe, Mukesh, and Shannon have done a good job with the relationship and the relationship building. They have been able to work with us even when we look at licensing and the amount of licenses that we have to purchase for all these devices. They have worked with us even on that.

Positive

This is my first opportunity to use and work in this environment. I came from a different technology before, so this is my first introduction.

It is easy to deploy. We have a team that helps set up the system before it goes live, and they have really got it down to an art at this point.

For one site, we can probably get it stood up with servers and other things that are needed within about two weeks. It is fairly simple. It also depends on the download it takes and how much data that you want to use. There are a lot of variables in there, but it would take about two weeks.

They are always looking to upgrade their versions, which is great. Most recently, they upgraded their version to help with an issue that we were having in CTERA. That was good. However, when I first got here, we were on so many different versions of CTERA that we committed ourselves to only upgrading once a year. They may have several versions or two other versions coming out throughout the year, but we only upgrade once. We have so many sites and so many places that we have to touch. We can only do it during downtime, which makes it very difficult for us, so we deploy the version at the beginning of the year and do not touch it for the rest of the year.

We did not use any third-party integrator or consultant. We worked directly with Joe and the team.

Its benefits can be seen immediately. It is an edge filer that does well when it is operating at its most efficient. You can see its benefits immediately when the storage is correct, the latency is lower, and there is proper bandwidth and a good connection with Active Directory. You can go from a site that has no CTERA device and that was just sending over the wire because it was a smaller scanning site to begin with. After deploying a CTERA device, you can immediately get benefits from it.

There are so many moving parts of CTERA because you are connected not only to Active Directory; you have the network connections, routers, switches, etc. There are many things that it goes through to get to your central environment, including your overall bandwidth from the ISP. If everything is working and operating as it should, it is a good service. You do not need to touch it a lot. You need to have everything working, and that is no fault of CTERA. There are a lot of moving parts when you look at everything that goes into it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. We have many third-party products that are not edge filers like CTERA. From a product standpoint, they compare well, but the support really lifts CTERA higher. The support aspect is very significant.

My main use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is that it's a file server. I can give you a quick specific example of how I use it as a file server in my organization: it's a standard file server with shares on CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform mapped to users, and they use it according to their function.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has impacted my organization positively. It functions exactly as a Windows server, and users are just happy about it.

When I say users are happy, it's just the standard normal day-to-day usage without any hassles.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is perfectly fine for our use case. As far as file shares are concerned, it works exactly as our previous platform, and we are very happy with it.

In my opinion, the best features CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers are that it's very similar to the Windows file server that we used earlier. I think it needs a lot less maintenance, and it's a lot cheaper to use than Windows.

When I mention it has lower maintenance, it's more that we don't have to do the standard Windows updates every month or so.

I believe the current feature set of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform suffices all our requirements.

I have not seen anything I'd like to see improved with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform. We're very happy with the current feature set and functionality.

I have been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for four years.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is very stable.

I haven't really had the opportunity to scale the file servers, but in terms of scaling the cloud, it's very easy to purchase more cloud storage space from CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

Customer support is fantastic, and I would rate it ten out of ten.

I previously used a different solution. We used Windows file server and switched because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's solution was a lot cheaper than Windows and it provided the same feature set.

I assess my employees' learning curve for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as almost zero. We were online within twenty-four hours.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing was very favorable. It was cheaper than our previous platform.

The setup costs were lower due to less hardware and faster deployment. We engaged CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform services for setting up, and their services have been great as they were able to deliver what they had promised in two days, migrating us from the old server to the new.

I have not seen a return on investment. Our use case is file shares, and it doesn't impact money or time.

The setup costs were lower due to less hardware and faster deployment. We engaged CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform services for setting up, and their services have been great as they were able to deliver what they had promised in two days, migrating us from the old server to the new.

Before choosing CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, I did evaluate other options. We evaluated Nasuni, Panzura, and a few more including Ignite.

My advice to others looking into using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is that if they are currently using Windows file server for presenting their file shares, they should be looking at CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as a cheaper option to achieve the same purpose. I would rate this product ten out of ten.