CTERA Virtualizes Cloud Storage Gateway Portfolio

CTERA Networks announced a series of updates to its cloud storage gateway portfolio, including a virtual appliance configuration that allows enterprises to use their existing remote office/branch office (ROBO) hardware to deliver a CTERA cloud storage gateway.

The company also announced a re-engineering of its gateway file management system, with the primary file system maintained and orchestrated centrally in the cloud. Appliances can act as additional storage tiers in a cloud-based file management and synchronization system that combines endpoints, offices and the cloud, according to CTERA.

“User experience and security are equally paramount in CTERA,” Jeff Denworth, senior vice president of Marketing, told eWEEK.” With respect to user experience, in many ways a NAS and backup appliance needs to essentially be invisible to today’s legacy NAS and backup users, so we first work very hard to make sure our enterprise NAS and backup appliance has the features and capabilities that enterprise customers expect.”

At the same time, Denworth noted, there is a class of IT users who are looking for consumer-grade experiences around accessing and sharing their files and backups on modern devices.

“By moving to a model where users and admins can selectively sync files to our gateways, the solution evolves beyond basic replication and also acts as something of a file-tiering appliance where there is no longer a 1-to-1 ratio of active files on our gateways to files in the cloud,” he said. “Now, users can host some files on the gateways while retaining older and less-frequently accessed files in the cloud.”

A virtual form factor eliminates the need to deploy and management multiple systems at the office, and allows an organization to consolidate multiple technologies including office servers, firewalls, print servers, file servers, DHCP services and in-office backup services onto a single converged server.

Data continues to grow at an astounding pace, with IDC estimating worldwide data growth rates at 40 percent year over year.

“The interesting thing is that we see shrinking endpoint capacity as organizations move to SSD-enabled laptops and desktops, thin clients and tablets,” Denworth said. “Therefore, a solution that enables you to unify access and selectively sync files to your endpoints (hot data), gateways on the local network (warm data) and the cloud (cold data) is more important than ever.”

CTERA gateway services now can be deployed from either VMware or KVM servers, offering additional options for organizations investing in converged infrastructure or virtualized IT, according to the company.