The CTERA Enterprise File Service Platform, is an intelligent data fabric that powers a secure next-generation global file system connecting remote sites and users to your cloud without compromising security or performance.

CTERA provides its customers with all the tools to create and support a Global File System. The CTERA Enterprise File Service Platform includes the following components:

CTERA Portal

CTERA Edge Filer

CTERA Drive

CTERA Insight

CTERA Portal facilitates access to cloud storage services; handles data protection and file sync & share services; used for provisioning and monitoring global file services. This is the beating heart of the system and is the component that will run in the customer’s Datacenter or VPC. The portal ensures data consistency, maintains version history, and facilitates file sharing among users, regardless of their access method. Both global source-based deduplication and data compression are used to ensure that only incremental data changes are transferred for storage in the cloud, and that data blocks are stored only once. This dramatically reduces storage capacity needs and overall network traffic.

CTERA Edge Filers are a line of physical and virtual appliances that function as cloud storage gateways to streamline cloud storage access for remote sites.

CTERA Drive includes CTERA Drive Connect, CTERA Drive Share/Protect and CTERA Drive Mobile. These are endpoint clients that support accelerated remote file access, data protection and file sharing, for users desktops and laptops, as well as mobile apps such as smartphones.

CTERA Insight is a Software as a service (SaaS) tool, hosted by CTERA, that provides the best way to make sure you remain up and running. CTERA Insight is deeply integrated with CTERA’s Hybrid Cloud Data Platform providing real-time monitoring of the CTERA Portal and CTERA Edge Filers connected to the portal that have auditing enabled, from one central Web-based interface. By delivering end-to-end observability across edge locations, organizations can make data-driven decisions that enhance security, optimize storage, and reduce costs. By knowing exactly how the CTERA platform is behaving at any given moment means that you can identify any potential problems before they become serious and resolve them.

As unstructured data continues to grow across distributed environments, CTERA Insight empowers IT teams to monitor and manage data activities across locations with greater accuracy and efficiency:

Monitor Activity: Real-time dashboard visualizations of file activity across edge filers, with granular detail and performance metrics. CTERA Insight enables organizations to identify trends and make informed IT operations and security decisions.

Discover Usage: A comprehensive view into storage consumption, file types, access distribution, and ownership. CTERA Insight helps to pinpoint opportunities for storage optimization, better predict capacity requirements, and maintain compliance.

Investigate Security Incidents: Long-term audit logging, enabling detailed filtering and activity forensics. It enables in-depth investigations of suspicious behaviors, helping enforce robust security measures across the organization.

Curate Datasets for AI: Identify and refine high-quality datasets from vast volumes of unstructured data to advance large language model (LLM) and machine learning (ML) initiatives.

Optimized for performance and scale, CTERA Insight delivers powerful insights with minimal impact on system performance. Pre-built dashboards and a powerful big-data pipeline provide clear, actionable visualizations that allow IT teams to quickly respond to emerging data trends.

These components enable CTERA to offer true global file services: files are centrally stored and protected, while users can easily access them everywhere. On top of the “all-in-one” global namespace/filesystem approach, CTERA enables its customers to achieve the following goals:

Military-grade security – A private and secure architecture powered by end-to-end encryption using cryptographic libraries certified with FIP 140-3, advanced authentication, antivirus, and behind-the-firewall deployment. For additional information about CTERA Portal security, see https://kb.ctera.com/docs/portaladmin1-1-6. For additional information about CTERA Edge Filer security, see https://kb.ctera.com/docs/best-practices-preventing-compromising-a-ctera-edge-filer.

Global deduplication – Most modern storage solutions apply deduplication only to centrally stored files. CTERA has taken deduplication to the next level, applying the algorithms at both cloud and edge. Not only does the Portal support global deduplication, but CTERA Edge Filers and Drive clients offer source-based deduplication, greatly reducing the size of files being sent to the cloud and lowering storage costs substantially.

WAN optimization – To overcome bandwidth and latency limitations, a slew of optimization techniques are used in order to reduce file sizes and transfer times to/from any access point.

Intelligent caching – Every Edge Filer and Drive application comes with a built-in file cache. Caching accelerates remote access, plus it enables access points to “view” the full file storage space, and have on-demand access to every available file.

CTERA Portals, edge filers and endpoints are centrally managed from CTERA Portal using a single web-based console. Template-based management, centralized monitoring, customized alerting and remote software and firmware upgrade capabilities make it easy to manage gateways of various types and sizes as well as individual endpoints – up to hundreds of thousands of connected devices – with no need for on-site IT presence in remote locations.

How It Fits Together

Example CTERA Architecture

POC Architecture