CTERA Intelligent Data Platform

Our digital services business handles physical documents by converting them into digital formats for delivery to our customers. This process involves receiving hard copies, scanning them, and utilizing the Kofax application to generate soft copies.
To support this workflow, we operate a vast network of scanning sites across more than 15 regions. In the US alone, we have over 30 sites, with major hubs in Dallas and Freehold serving as primary intake points.
To ensure all scanned documents are processed on our centralized server, we utilize CTERA Edge Filers to synchronize data from these remote locations to our central sites. We currently manage a fleet of over 250 Edge Filers across the entire Iron Mountain network to maintain this synchronization.

Zones, CloudDrive Folders & CloudDrive Folder Group feature enables data to sync between locations, avoiding unnecessary transfers of all data. Data sync happens based on the defined policies helps in increasing enterprise productivity and improving business continuity. Block-level deduplication reduces data transfer and storage requirements.​A highly platform-independent solution helps enterprises reduce infrastructure costs and maintain business continuity with greater ease.​ It helped us streamline operations and minimize the technical ​& operational challenges​.

The user interface is excellent. The centralized GUI allows us to efficiently manage and configure all our Edge Filers from a single, user-friendly console.
Regarding file replication and versioning, while the platform offers robust versioning capabilities, we currently limit our use of this feature due to storage constraints associated with our terabytes of data.
In terms of data protection, we utilize the platform's wide array of features, including various encryption methodologies and ransomware protection, to secure our environment.
We have also found the platform to be highly stable. Although we initially encountered Cloud Sync DB errors when CTERA was first introduced at Iron Mountain, the latest version has resolved these issues and is performing reliably.
Finally, scalability is one of the platform's strongest attributes. It is highly flexible and adapts easily to our requirements. The licensing model, such as the transition from various licensing models, allows us to scale our data capacity as needed without being locked into an initial purchase.

There are some micro-level loggings that would have been better in improvising, and all those details are in the pipeline. Recently, we heard about the Samba, which is currently using an older version that needs upgrading. Apart from that, everything is exceptional; the product is exceptional. To be honest, when it comes to performance and reliability, it performs well in our Iron Mountain network. The problem isn't CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform ; it's with the infrastructure we have. If you have good infrastructure, it works fine; if there's an issue with your infrastructure, no application can help you with that. We faced challenges like AD connectivity issues, but solutions are available. We don't have proper infrastructure for managing that.

I have nearly four plus years of experience with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform .

When it comes to stability, I would say it is good and perhaps even better than before. Earlier, when it was introduced to Iron Mountain, we experienced issues with Cloud Sync DB error. However, with the latest version, we are not observing those issues and find it more stable now than previously.

The scalability of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is one of the best parts; it is highly scalable. It totally depends on the customer's requirements. The licensing supports various data sizes, such as EV16 supporting up to 16 terabytes, and if you exceed that, you move to EV32. You can change whenever you want without being locked into your initial purchase.

I have contacted the technical support or customer support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform. The speed and quality are exceptional, as CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has some of the best technical support. It depends on the type of incident, as they have critical, high, and low severity levels. For critical issues, we receive a call within 10 to 15 minutes of creating a request. That's among the best things about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

Similar solutions include an application called Nasuni , Wasabi , which we tried. Before CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, we worked with multiple vendors, testing various applications including Panzura, but ultimately concluded that CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is performing better compared to other applications.

The initial deployment of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is very easy; even a non-technical person can easily deploy it.

We just need one person to deploy it; even a non-technical person can do that.

Ransom Protect is helping a lot. Moreover, the data we are using is only accessible to Iron Mountain employees, and the scanned data resides exclusively in the Iron Mountain network, making it inaccessible to outside customers. That's why we are not using that feature across everywhere; only recently for new customers where some users work from client locations, we enabled the VPN but have concerns about data security, which is the reason we enable the ransomware feature only in a few locations, not everywhere. But again, it's helping a lot.

I have seen effects on the Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives. Recovery Point Objective  is based on the projects, and at Iron Mountain, we have that agreement. I'm not sure about the specifics, but it's very less, less than an hour for both. I haven't gone through the documentation regarding the agreements; only the management knows the details.

Concerning pricing, I have no idea as billing and POCs are handled by a different team, but from the information I have, it's a competitive price when compared to others. These solutions are specific to particular requirements and do come with a cost, but they definitely have a competitive pricing model.

When it comes to deploying it for the first time, if you are provisioning it on the cloud, we use a Terraform  script for deploying the DB and application server. If you're doing it on-prem, like Nutanix or ESX, manual execution is required. It hardly takes 15 to 30 minutes to spin up the DB and app server, and for all the configuration, it takes a maximum of one hour, not more than that.

I would rate this product with a review rating of 10.

We have approximately 80 nodes around the world and we're using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform  mostly for unstructured file storage.

I appreciate the recoverability of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform , the fact that we have cloud sync working and we're able to use versioning as well as recovery of deleted files. It really makes life easy because people tend to change things and delete things when they don't mean to.

That's probably one of my favorite features of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, but I also appreciate the fact that it's very flexible. It seems to be fairly bandwidth compliant, so we're always looking at ensuring we don't overload our circuits, especially when we're doing our cloud syncs.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has helped free up our IT resources for other projects and tasks. It's been very easy. When we do see issues, their support is top-notch and very responsive when we need help. It has really made it easier for us to be able to globally assign storage. We're putting local nodes rather than trying to put them in data centers and really having problems with overall timing. We always want our data close to our applications and our people. In this case, it helps a lot to maintain that.

We use CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform a lot because typically end users are not very good stewards of their own data, and CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform helps us when they break something or lose things. We had an incident in Illinois where we had to recover an entire directory because somebody deleted all the files, and we were able to do that. Someone also came to us saying they changed a huge spreadsheet they had been working on for months and needed to go back a version. That makes us look really good because we're able to quickly respond to those types of requests. It makes people think I have my superhero cape on because they're thinking it's all lost, they're doomed, and we're able to quickly and effectively go back and say, "Here  you go," and it's not hours, it's minutes.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is extremely scalable. For us it's probably about a 15-minute process when, especially in the cloud sync, somebody drops a large volume of data. I'm easily able to add on. They come in 50-terabyte chunks, so that's pretty scalable in my mind. It's not a huge oversell, so it's a pretty sweet spot for us when we're adding in new sites or new data, especially when it comes to doing desktop image backups and things of that nature. Someone might come to me saying, "Hey, I need a 10-terabyte node," and I'm easily able to spin that up within hours, not days.

When we implemented CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform early on, and we've been on the platform for three years, we have three different cloud portals. We have an EU portal, we have an Americas portal, and we have an APAC portal. It would be nice if we could combine that into one portal just for that global single pane of glass look. We've talked with them about that and they say it's challenging just because of some of the structure, but that would be something nice if we could get that. I integrated with Varonis, and because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform didn't have initially a working relationship with that vendor, it would have been nice had that pre-existed us saying we need this. But that wasn't totally CTERA's fault. There was a lot of challenge working with the vendor to build out that interface.

A single pane of glass for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform would be beneficial. Everything else works fairly well. We've never had a point where we couldn't get to something that caused us to have a serious outage, and that to me is the mark of a good software package. It's never really caused us serious issues. We have our issues, that's true, and every software package does. However, we've always been able to meet the needs of the business, and we drive hard on security, stability, and scalability. From the scalability standpoint, that's one of the most important things to us. We're on their capacity-based licensing, so if I need to ramp up another CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform NAS , if we have an M&A, I can easily and quickly spin up another NAS  and start doing that data transition fairly quickly.

The biggest maintenance issue with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is firmware upgrades. We've done a lot of transition from hardware solution to virtualized infrastructure in order to minimize that hardware lifecycle portion of it. We have to upgrade the firmware and sometimes that can be challenging in the nature of business of our size with 80 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform nodes around the globe.

The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time. For our smaller sites, it would be an hour or two, and I can build that into a fairly easy change window. But in our larger sites where we may have hundreds of terabytes of data, that database update process took maybe a day or a day and a half. That becomes more challenging, especially in a manufacturing environment where people are wanting to access configuration files. We had to pin the data locally because the data would be available on the local edge filer, but the cloud sync, while it was updating the database, the cloud files weren't available. That would be the other thing I'd like to see an improvement on: some way to do those database upgrades either in a more segmented fashion or in some type of offline environment. I understand the logistics behind that sounds easy, but I'm sure it's not.

We've been using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for approximately seven years.

We haven't had stability issues from CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform side. I've seen some challenges where users tried to use a NAS device in what I'll call an inappropriate method. We just had a recent instance where some of our users were storing Access databases out on a NAS, which the documentation clearly states is a bad idea. They bent over backwards to try and help us make it work, and we were able to do some things there. More often than not, we've never had any other types of issues from the CTERA side.

The learning curve for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for our employees is not bad. When we have questions, support's been very responsive for us.

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform has helped free up our IT resources for other projects and tasks. It's been very easy. When we do see issues, their support is top-notch and very responsive when we need help. It has really made it easier for us to be able to globally assign storage by putting local nodes rather than trying to put them in data centers and having problems with overall timing. We always want our data close to our applications and our people, and in this case, it helps a lot to maintain that.

The quality and speed of support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is some of the best in the industry. I've worked with a lot of different companies through the years, and even from simple questions to complex ones, they've been very responsive. To the point where sometimes I wonder when our dedicated support engineer sleeps.

Several of our people have taken their admin training class for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, which obviously helps a lot because it gives an in-depth look at the operational factors involved.

I was not around when CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform was fully onboarded. However, I'm sure it was not a short process just because of our volume of data. We're storing currently right around 2.2 petabytes.

From an application standpoint concerning the Ransom Protect feature, it's not really that pertinent, but from a global support team perspective, we have a follow-the-support model. It helps that we're able to quickly respond globally to incidents, whether that be in APAC, EU, or the US. They're very good about making sure that we have the ability to do that.

I'd like to see a Varonis integration natively with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform.

Database upgrades in a segmented fashion or offline for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform would be beneficial. This review has been given a rating of 8 out of 10.