CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform Reviews

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.

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.

We are using the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform in two areas. The first is as a platform for our customers, providing a modern infrastructure. The second, more sophisticated use case is for internal usage as our internal file server. We have a huge file system. Currently, it is used internally, but in the future, we might prepare the infrastructure or create applications that will be accessible via the Internet, beyond just internal use.

The most significant benefit is caching. I am providing high-performance NVMe devices for all file systems. Most of the data is stored on an internal S3 cloud, rather than an external one. This internal S3 infrastructure stores all copies of the data, with snapshots for versioning and disaster recovery. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is excellent because we use high-performance storage for mission-critical data, while other data (including voice records and PDFs for customer billing) is stored on more cost-effective infrastructure.

Thanks to caching, after implementation, performance—especially for Citrix VDI access and profiles—improved by 20 to 30 seconds.

Another financial and technical benefit is that we no longer need to rely on external software for backup. We now use the CTERA portal for this. All the snapshots are stored on different S3 storage platform, eliminating the need to pay high licensing fees for tools like Rubrik or Commvault. These tools are also harder to implement and don't offer the convenience of versioning with a simple right-click. Versioning is a great feature, allowing me to restore files from the latest update, bypassing daily backups. Using S3 storage makes it economical and efficient.

Vault is another useful feature. For regulatory compliance, we must retain certain files for seven years, and Vault allows us to store these files without the need for incremental backups. Once a backup is placed in the vault, it is untouchable and cannot be deleted.

CTERA file sync (compressed and deduplicated) is excellent. Additionally, we have two disaster recovery methods: restoring the entire file system through the portal or using storage replication. We test the replication once a year, and we can establish a disaster recovery site in two to three minutes.

Both versioning and replication are critical for meeting our SLAs. Our CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is fully prepared for disaster recovery. As per our regulations, we must test disaster recovery at least once a year and demonstrate to management that we can establish new sites. The last test showed an RTO of two to three minutes. We haven’t experienced any actual disasters, but regular testing ensures readiness.

Prior to 2018, our infrastructure was unable to even test disaster recovery due to file limitations. For the last five years, we’ve maintained near-zero RTO or even RPO, operating almost asynchronously. Having a very low RTO is critical, and we can reestablish the infrastructure on the new filer in just a few minutes, which represents a substantial improvement.

We’ve also implemented and tested a new feature to prevent ransomware attacks. This is a significant advancement in the NAS world. We recently installed a new version and demonstrated to our CISO how a real ransomware attack could be stopped within seconds, showing that the affected client’s access to the file server was blocked. Fortunately, we haven't faced a real attack, but being able to showcase our protection to management is a significant benefit.

We started seeing benefits immediately after we migrated our Citrix profiles. We had about 2,000 users on our Citrix infrastructure and terminal servers. All login profiles were placed on CTERA. With the previous infrastructure, the login process took 45 seconds, including application startups. After moving the profiles to CTERA, we observed an improvement of at least 20 to 25 seconds.

Another benefit is storage reclamation. We use Dell NVMe PowerMax, which is extremely costly for a small portion of our data. With the CTERA platform, we gain excellent performance for files in the cache, while archived files on S3 are still easily accessible. This combination allowed us to observe improvements from day one. Additional benefits include ransomware protection, versioning, and reduced software costs for backups. We started with 30 to 50 terabytes, and now we manage nearly 300 terabytes.

Choosing CTERA in 2018 was risky, as it was just a startup at the time. However, from my perspective, it has proven to be an excellent decision.

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 several options, including Cohesity and Nasuni, before finding the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to be the best fit for our needs. We performed a proof of concept with our applications director, and based on the positive results, I recommended the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform to senior management.

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform's replication and versioning capabilities are reliable, and we have not encountered any major complaints in these areas. We have built-in high availability and disaster recovery support through our architecture, which includes three CTERA filers. One is on-prem on Apollo 4200. The second filer is a VMware virtual machine, and the third one is in Azure. In terms of the application servers, we have three application servers sitting in the Azure cloud, and we also have two database servers. We have a replication server between Database 1 and Database 2, which also sits in Azure. That is the primary architecture as far as CTERA is concerned. The replication works pretty well, and I did not find any major complaints regarding the replication aspect. We do get notifications if something does not happen or if there are any error messages, but that is in a normal stride.

The product has significantly contributed to reducing our recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). That is what they promised. We have stub files on the filers that we use. It has been helpful in the reduction of storage, RTO, and RPO.

We were able to see its benefits immediately because that is how it has been structured. Once we migrate and upload the data to the cloud, we see all the magic happening almost immediately or within a couple of hours. Once we upload the data through the filer, it goes on the portal. From the portal, the metadata changes are made into the filer, and from the portal, it does a sync on all the other filers. It takes an hour to two to sync up all the devices within the infrastructure.

We never had any problems or any security concerns related to data protection. It has been good so far, so I believe they have something robust and secure out there. We do have a parent company that looks into any security concerns, and we have never received any complaint related to the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

I primarily use the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for SMB shares and object storage. To accommodate my growing needs, I plan to migrate the Hitachi Content Platform for archival purposes and expand to a broader platform.

CTERA's instantaneous and redundant file replication, available across multiple geographical locations, ensures easy and user-friendly recovery. Even end users can effortlessly restore files to previous versions.

Our disaster recovery solution utilizes the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform in an active-active configuration with a primary gateway at one location and a secondary gateway at another, working as a potentially remote site and our primary data center, respectively. This setup ensures continuous access to data, as users can seamlessly connect to the secondary gateway if the primary location experiences an outage. The active-active configuration provides instantaneous failover, eliminating the need for manual intervention.

Our Recovery Time Objective has been improved compared to previous solutions, eliminating the need for multiple configuration changes. By updating the Domain Name System to include both the primary and secondary systems in the Failover System, we ensure continuous service even if the primary system fails, eliminating the need for manual intervention or Disaster Recovery procedures.

Our Recovery Point Objective, compared to previous solutions, is optimal with minimal outages or impacts.

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers immediate benefits due to its unique approach, distinguishing it from legacy solutions.

It helps free up some IT resources for other projects or tasks.

CTERA enhances data protection with ransom protection, which tags unusual activity and restricts unauthorized access. This helps identify malicious activity within the environment. Additionally, CTERA offers basic protections, including database server-level replication, ideally restricted in a DMZ-like scenario.

We use the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform as a file share. 

We are using it as a backup. They have versions for users to recover on their own. We have done a lot of restores, so versioning included with CTERA helps a lot.

We have less staff for doing restores because users can do it on their own. This reduces our IT requirements.

Our use case varies because the product has a few modules. We use it as a backup agent for our endpoints and a centralized storage solution, providing an on-premise caching server that some organizations might call an edge filer. The master file copy lives in cloud storage. It's a complete hybrid storage solution for file management.

We saw the benefits of CTERA almost immediately. The timing was perfect. We were deploying it around the time the global pandemic struck. It put us in a position to provide off-site access to our employees that we couldn't do before. It had a dramatic impact on how we do work. CTERA was exceptionally valuable in the first three to four months

The platform contributes to our organization's success and our employees' ability to work remotely. It makes us more attractive to future employees because we can have them operate off-site without needing them to come to the office and be in the same building as the central storage solution.

CTERA's disaster recovery features have reduced our recovery time. I used it last week for some missing files that we hadn't noticed for a while. We could go back into our snapshots for 14 months and track down the needed files. Once we found them, we could bring them back online within minutes. That was terrific. We've increased efficiency on RPOs and RTOs by 20 percent. We could increase that to 50 percent if we had search access to those archives.

It is our main production file share. Our main reason for going for this solution was the uncontrollable growth of file data. It was unsustainable on our previous platform or technology. We needed something scalable like CTERA, so it was the scalability that we required.

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.