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CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
CTERA Enterprise File Services reduced costs and time, minimized manual storage, and eliminated SSD and alternative storage needs.
Sentiment score
6.8
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure delivers ROI by reducing costs and simplifying management, enhancing resource efficiency and minimizing downtime.
Adding SSD storage to Windows file servers is expensive, and we no longer need to back up those devices.
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.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.3
CTERA's platform provides responsive support, rated highly for proactive assistance and efficient issue resolution by knowledgeable agents.
Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's customer service is praised for quick, knowledgeable support and effective resolution despite some cost concerns.
They swiftly address concerns and take ownership of the call, providing a very satisfactory support experience.
High-priority issues are handled promptly.
I would rate their support a ten out of ten.
When we send an email, an engineer is assigned within 15 to 20 minutes, and we get on a call to resolve the issue.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
CTERA's platform is scalable and easy to expand globally, though CPU and memory licensing constraints may pose challenges.
Sentiment score
7.9
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers seamless scalability, allowing effortless, efficient cluster expansion to accommodate diverse business sizes and needs.
If we need to upgrade CPU and memory, we should be able to do that without a license upgrade.
CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow.
It offers good scalability options, including vertical and outward scalability.
The scalability of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) deserves an eight out of ten rating, as there is no solution that is 100% efficient and there is always room for improvement.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
CTERA's platform faced initial bugs but improved over time, earning high stability ratings with reliable data access.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers outstanding reliability and stability, with minimal downtime and prompt support addressing minor issues effectively.
It has been pretty stable since then.
We had things deployed for years, and we were suddenly getting cloud sync issues that were crashing our sites.
It is very stable and reliable.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
Regarding stability, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a seven out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

The CTERA platform needs improvements in monitoring, updates, UI, logging, and performance, while users value current features and support.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure needs improvements in pricing, setup, integration, user interface, performance, and multi-tenancy features for users.
AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring.
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.
It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices.
We hope Nutanix can integrate inside our current license module.
I would suggest that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) should develop their own P2V (physical to VM) tools instead of requiring users to rely on third-party solutions.
They should add AI features in the future.
 

Setup Cost

CTERA offers cost-effective enterprise file services with flexible licensing, providing significant savings over EMC and Nasuni, especially in Israel.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure provides competitive pricing and flexible licensing, offering good ROI and TCO benefits despite hardware costs.
Unlike other solutions that require hardware purchases, CTERA offers software licensing with flexibility across multiple infrastructure providers.
CTERA’s pricing should be more proportional and accessible so that cost is not the factor preventing customers from purchasing.
CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
It costs more compared to VMware due to different licensing areas.
At first, it is cheaper than cloud services, so the cost is a major benefit.
 

Valuable Features

CTERA excels in scalability, flexibility, data management, and protection, making it ideal for hybrid cloud and remote work environments.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers high performance, user-friendly management, scalability, integration, and cost efficiency with seamless updates and monitoring.
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.
A vital advantage of this platform is its instantaneous recovery capability, allowing seamless access to a secondary gateway if the primary one fails.
It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution.
When technology development or devops teams request server provisioning, the setup time has been reduced from hours to less than 20 minutes.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
It is easy to use, and it's easy to maintain.
 

Categories and Ranking

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (4th), Cloud Backup (7th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (6th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (9th)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (4th), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)
 

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 10.8%, up 7.0% compared to last year.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 9.6% mindshare, up 8.0% since last year.
File System Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform10.8%
Nasuni24.6%
Panzura CloudFS16.4%
Other48.199999999999996%
File System Software
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)9.6%
VxRail15.8%
VMware vSAN13.9%
Other60.7%
HCI
 

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.
MahendraPanchotiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates
Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
68%
Educational Organization
4%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Retailer
3%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
 

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 Business91
Midsize Enterprise77
Large Enterprise82
 

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...
How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?
Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...
What makes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) worth using?
NCI is a product with many tools and services but the one that, in my opinion, makes it better than similar products and worth using, is the full-stack lifecycle management. This capacity allows u...
Have you received reliable help from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support when you contacted them?
NCI is one of the best out there. For any software, no matter how good it is, technical support makes it or breaks it for me. You may have an amazing product but if there is not anyone to help you ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nasuni, CTERA, Panzura and others in File System Software. Updated: September 2025.
870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.