CTERA’s Cloud Attached Storage adds File Sharing to Cloud Backup
Cloud backup is an established and pretty well understood technology. Many solutions outside of the consumer market utilize a ‘hybrid’ architecture, which puts a storage device onsite to provide backup and local restores for client servers, desktops and laptops on the network. These appliances then transfer data to cloud storage, typically hosted by the service provider that also supplied the appliance.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Briefing Note
Eric Slack, Senior Analyst
CTERA is not a client of Storage Switzerland
CTERA follows this model, targeting the SMB space with a cloud service platform and a managed appliance. Users put an agent on laptops, desktops and servers and back these clients up to the appliance locally. The CTERA appliance encrypts and optimizes the data for WAN transfer to the cloud using deduplication and compression, allowing users to throttle bandwidth and schedule transfers for minimal impact.
Aside from cloud backup, CTERA has added another important aspect to this offering, which they call “Cloud Attached Storage”. CTERA’s appliances also support file sharing and collaboration by synchronizing files on networked computers (or the internet) with the cloud attached storage device via CIFS, WebDAV, rsync or the CTERA agent. This makes it a one-box storage and data protection solution for SMBs.
CTERA’s C400 offers four hot swap SATA drives in a RAID configuration (up to 12TB raw) and the C200, half that. Both support Next3, CTERA’s open-source file system which provides enterprise-grade snapshot capabilities. It enables users to recover historic versions of files to meet compliance or data protection requirements, or just improve productivity. The CloudPlug is a backup-only appliance (no file sharing) designed to meet the data protection needs of smaller users.
MSPs or VARs can sell the CTERA service to users and host the cloud (CTERA portal) on their own infrastructure with the Datacenter Edition. Or, the SaaS Edition allows a provider to connect to a public cloud and get the same provider features, like managing user accounts, creating service plans and private branding.
Storage Swiss Take
CTERA has taken an existing technology and improved it by adding functionality that leverages the hardware that’s already in place. A hybrid backup appliance is essentially a NAS box, so why not use it at such, and add some data services like snapshots and synchronization? In the SMB space they’re targeting, users are buying cloud backup already. Now they can also get cloud file services and collaboration in the same box, at the same time.
