About CTERA Portal

CTERA Portal is a scalable cloud service delivery platform that you install at your own data center or in a cloud environment and use to create, deliver and manage cloud storage applications, including a Global File System, file access via stubbing/caching, backup, and mobile collaboration. CTERA Portal is compatible with cloud storage infrastructure from multiple vendors, including EMC, Wasabi, Scality, IBM COS, Hitachi HCP, and cloud storage providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.

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. You extend the global file system to users, via CTERA Edge Filers (gateways), CTERA Drive (agents), CTERA Connect, and CTERA Mobile apps (devices). 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 Portal enables you to create one or more tenants, called Virtual Portals. These tenants are accessed by end-users and management staff via web-based interfaces. CTERA Edge Filers and endpoint CTERA Drives are centrally managed from CTERA Portal using a single web-based console. Programmable, event-driven microservices framework for workflow automation, cyber protection and data analytics, template-based management, centralized monitoring, customized alerting and remote software and firmware upgrade capabilities make it easy to manage CTERA Edge Filers 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.

Together, these components allow 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/file system approach, CTERA allows its customers to achieve the following goals:

Military-grade security – A private and secure architecture powered by end-to-end encryption, advanced authentication, anti-virus, 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.

Managing a large global file system, with thousands of access points and tens of thousands of users, can be quite challenging. To simplify the process and support scale, to tens of thousands of users and sites, the CTERA Portal comes with advanced management tools, including template-based automation. In addition, CTERA Portal comes with rich activity dashboards and analytics, allowing administrators to observe, monitor and troubleshoot every aspect of their global file system.

A CTERA Portal installation comprises a cluster of one or more VMs (servers). Each server can host any combination of the following services:

• Main database. Only one server can host the main database. The server that hosts the main database is called the primary server.

• Database replication server. A passive database service set to replicate the primary server. During server installation, you can turn on the replication service and select the primary server from which to replicate.

• Application server. This service accepts connections and handles requests from Web and CTTP clients. Application servers are added to the cluster to increase client handling capacity. Any servers that are enabled as application servers automatically balance the connected clients between them, allowing for maximized capacity and availability.

• Messaging server. This server enables sending notifications from the portal to various consumers, for example the Varonis Data Security Platform, which is a connector running on top of the CTERA Messaging Service. In production environments that use the messaging service, the CTERA Portal must include three application servers defined as messaging servers.

• Document preview server. This server is used to process document preview requests. The document preview server supports high availability. You can install one or more servers, in order to ensure uninterrupted document preview generation and redundancy in the event of a server failure.

By default, the first installed server is the primary server, hosting the main database and application server. You can install any number of additional servers. The same procedure is used to install all the server instances.