Product Documentation

The CTERA Enterprise File Service Platform powers a 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 Global File System includes the following components:

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 – A line of physical and virtual appliances that function as ‘cloud storage gateways’ to streamline cloud storage access for remote sites

CTERA Drive (CTERA Drive Protect and CTERA Drive Connect) and CTERA Mobile App – 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.

Together, 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, advanced authentication, antivirus, and behind-the-firewall deployment.

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 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