Storage Switzerland continues its test drive of the CTERA Cloud Attached Storage appliance. We have had the unit in our labs for almost 4 months now and have found no significant issues with it. Now seems like the ideal time to test more of the system’s extensive feature set, this month focusing on agent backup.

The CTERA C400 has several ways in which you can use the device to perform backups and subsequently have that data replicated to the cloud. First, you can copy data to the unit as if you would any other NAS and select those directories for cloud replication. Second, you can do agent-less backup where the CTERA box will log into your servers or laptops and essentially synchronize data from certain directories back to the CTERA storage. Finally, and what we show in the video below, you can install an agent on a server or laptop to be protected and then have that data sent to the CTERA appliance on a scheduled basis.

As you can see from the video above the CTERA is incredibly easy-to-use and has one of the most robust feature sets that we've seen in a storage device. The combination of backup, file sharing, and even block storage makes the CTERA worthy of strong consideration for any small to medium-sized data center.

The final test in this section of our test drive is to replicate the backups performed by the agent to the cloud. This functionality is similar to how you replicate other data to the cloud, but again, they’ve simplified the process. As you can see from the video below we just went to the cloud storage control panel, selected the agents that we wanted to have replicated and the job was done. This provides a very functional off-site capability that would be ideal for the small and medium-size business.

In our next video we will provide a general update of the overall use of the CTERA storage device as we approach our four month anniversary.

CTERA is a client of Storage Switzerland

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