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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
9
Ranking in other categories
NAS (9th), Cloud Migration (7th), Cloud Storage (10th), Cloud Backup (12th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd), Content Collaboration Platforms (12th)
Oracle ZFS
Ranking in File System Software
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 7.5%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle ZFS is 11.9%, down from 13.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

Igal Muginstein - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection
The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.
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

"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."
"The best feature is the migration tool within CTERA."
"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 solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."
"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."
"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 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is a hybrid solution that supports both on-premises and cloud environments."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy."
"It has a learning curve."
"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."
"AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring. Predictive storage analytics will help with better capacity planning. There can be some sort of intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."
"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."
"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."
"When retrieving data from the replication of remote sites, it does not give you immediate results. The RPO and RTO rates could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So far, pricing seems to be fine."
"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."
"CTERA's pricing 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."
"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."
"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
70%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Educational Organization
4%
University
3%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards.
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy. AI and automation features could enhance the ...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
We use it as a hosted cloud solution. We had initially tried Azure File Sync, but that did not work. Due to certain security concerns, I was tasked with researching alternatives. I evaluated severa...
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Also Known As

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ZFS
 

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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: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.