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.

A few features are valuable. The first one would be scalability. It is effectively unlimited in scale. The pricing is very fair. 

The availability of it is also valuable, and by that, I mean resilience. The architecture of how it is designed means that it is very easy to scale out and we can make it available to users wherever we need it.

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. Monitoring would be a good one.

We have been using this solution for at least two years.

We initially ran into a number of bugs. However, as of the last three months, they have largely been ironed out. We did run into some problems in the early days, but its stability is good now. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability. It is used by the entire business, and it is a global organization. It is used globally. We have around 850 users on it.

It is very good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We came from EMC. We switched because of scalability and recoverability. We wanted ransomware data recovery and data protection. 

There was also a lack of innovation from EMC. We like the modern features of CTERA. EMC was not innovating, and it was sort of a dying product.

It is deployed on-prem. Its deployment was fairly straightforward. It was simple to deploy CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform into our organization’s firewall.

It took us weeks to deploy it initially. It took us about three months to get to grips with it. We are kind of learning every day, but it was not particularly difficult. We were able to make good use of it after a few months.

Its maintenance requires usual system upgrades every three months. It is a one-man job, and we work with CTERA support on that.

We had two people working on it.

We have not measured it, but there is probably a 10% to 15% time-saving. That will grow because we have been spending a lot of time migrating and setting things up, but that has put us in a better position to take advantage of the platform.

I would rate it a six out of ten for pricing. 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. It has definitely saved us money based on our previous EMC system, but I am not responsible for billing.

I would recommend CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform for ease of use, scalability, and price.

We do have disaster recovery enabled, and it is our plan to use it when needed. We have tested it, and it works well.

We are not using CTERA’s Ransom Protect feature. I know there is a new feature for that, but I do not believe we are using a specific feature yet. It is something that we are probably looking to implement, so I cannot say if it has reduced downtime. Even if we had it, it would be hard to say because luckily, we have not been compromised.

I would rate CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform an eight out of ten.