Amazon FSx vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comparison

Amazon FSx vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon FSx

Ranking in File System Software

5th

Ranking in Cloud Storage

15th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File and Object Storage (15th)

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Ranking in File System Software

2nd

Ranking in Cloud Storage

4th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Backup (8th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (6th), AI Legal & Compliance (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Amazon FSx is 6.8%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 14.4%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File System Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform	14.4%
Amazon FSx	6.8%
Other	78.8%

File System Software

Featured Reviews

Sugan Balakrishnan

Senior Design Engineer at Clovertex

Provides seamless research data management with effortless setup

From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS. Sometimes we go with Weka or other solutions due to this need, so it should have more IO capacity when there is a demand. More performance is needed specifically in the IO area.

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Tim M.

Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Supports global file recovery and rapid data versioning across 80 nodes

When we implemented CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform early on, and we've been on the platform for three years, we have three different cloud portals. We have an EU portal, we have an Americas portal, and we have an APAC portal. It would be nice if we could combine that into one portal just for that global single pane of glass look. We've talked with them about that and they say it's challenging just because of some of the structure, but that would be something nice if we could get that. I integrated with Varonis, and because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform didn't have initially a working relationship with that vendor, it would have been nice had that pre-existed us saying we need this. But that wasn't totally CTERA's fault. There was a lot of challenge working with the vendor to build out that interface. A single pane of glass for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform would be beneficial. Everything else works fairly well. We've never had a point where we couldn't get to something that caused us to have a serious outage, and that to me is the mark of a good software package. It's never really caused us serious issues. We have our issues, that's true, and every software package does. However, we've always been able to meet the needs of the business, and we drive hard on security, stability, and scalability. From the scalability standpoint, that's one of the most important things to us. We're on their capacity-based licensing, so if I need to ramp up another CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform NAS, if we have an M&A, I can easily and quickly spin up another NAS and start doing that data transition fairly quickly. The biggest maintenance issue with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is firmware upgrades. We've done a lot of transition from hardware solution to virtualized infrastructure in order to minimize that hardware lifecycle portion of it. We have to upgrade the firmware and sometimes that can be challenging in the nature of business of our size with 80 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform nodes around the globe. The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time. For our smaller sites, it would be an hour or two, and I can build that into a fairly easy change window. But in our larger sites where we may have hundreds of terabytes of data, that database update process took maybe a day or a day and a half. That becomes more challenging, especially in a manufacturing environment where people are wanting to access configuration files. We had to pin the data locally because the data would be available on the local edge filer, but the cloud sync, while it was updating the database, the cloud files weren't available. That would be the other thing I'd like to see an improvement on: some way to do those database upgrades either in a more segmented fashion or in some type of offline environment. I understand the logistics behind that sounds easy, but I'm sure it's not.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I rate the stability of Amazon FSx ten out of ten."

"On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Amazon FSx a ten."

"The shared storage capability is highly valuable."

"We used it for disaster recovery perspective behind a number of resources, like batch services and RDS."

"FSx operates as an independent service, not tied to any server, which eliminates dependencies between applications for storage."

"It makes people think I have my superhero cape on because they're thinking it's all lost, they're doomed, and we're able to quickly and effectively go back and say, 'Here you go,' and it's not hours, it's minutes."

"CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities."

"CTERA has been particularly capable of keeping all of our workstations backed up. That became a critical feature for us during the pandemic when computers were rarely in the office. Everybody went off-site with their computers, and we were accustomed to working with a centralized storage infrastructure where people would come to the office and connect to the server to use, create, and modify files. Everything was done directly to that server."

"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."

"I like that the glass is always half full with CTERA file services. It keeps the data hot for users on location and then tiers off older data. If you need it, the stub is still there. You can click on it, and it's back on the device."

"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."

"CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform helps us when they break something or lose things, and it makes people think I have my superhero cape on because they're thinking it's all lost, they're doomed, and we're able to quickly and effectively go back and say, 'Here you go,' and it's not hours, it's minutes."

"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

Cons

"Amazon FSx is more costly compared to other storage solutions like EBS or EFS."

"From my experience, there are areas in Amazon FSx where more performance is needed, as they will be looking for higher IOPS."

"A direct FTP feature would be beneficial instead of relying on transmission services."

"I've been facing a challenge when doing a failover from FSx side. AWS console does not refresh within a half hour."

"The web portal that our users access to view data and backups could be optimized. CTERA could apply some of the improvements made to their administrative interface on the user side. The administrators are a much smaller group of people than the users, so it would be helpful if they targeted user experience resources to them."

"They fixed all the requirements that we had in the beginning. The beginning was a little bit rough, but we tuned it nicely. However, in some cases, they could improve performance."

"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."

"I am looking for a process where version upgrades do not impact the customers. There is no downtime."

"One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, but they do not give us any further information. I would like to have more information on the logs themselves."

"The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time."

"More monitoring from the platform would be good. There is some monitoring, but it is paid. It is a chargeable service. It would be good for that to be included in the base."

"One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The lowest price I have paid is $370 or $380 per month, while the highest can exceed $3,000 per month."

"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."

"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."

"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."

"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."

"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."

"So far, pricing seems to be fine."

"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

University

Retailer

Computer Software Company

64%

Outsourcing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	9

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon FSx?

What is your primary use case for Amazon FSx?

Our customers mainly use Amazon FSx for high-performance computing. Our customers are mainly in the Life Science and Pharma industries. The majority of people are looking at S3 as their destination...

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon FSx?

There is an ongoing project where my customers are exploring the FSx solution, but not yet for AI-driven projects; they plan to in the future. For those who want to use Amazon FSx, I recommend it a...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

I believe CTERA could improve their pricing experience by customizing price lists per region. For example, there is a difference between what is sold to customers in Israel versus U.S. customers. I...

What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

We have approximately 80 nodes around the world and we're using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform mostly for unstructured file storage.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Amazon FSx

Comparisons

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) vs Amazon FSx

Compared 10% of the time

Azure NetApp Files vs Amazon FSx

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Amazon FSx

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei FusionStorage vs Amazon FSx

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon FSx Competitors

Nasuni vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 17% of the time

Panzura CloudFS vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft OneDrive for Business vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Cloud Storage

Download Amazon FSx product report

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product report

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Also Known As

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

CTERA

Overview

Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems. With Amazon FSx, you can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups. It provides cost-efficient capacity and high levels of reliability, and it integrates with other AWS services so that you can manage and use the file systems in cloud-native ways.

Amazon FSx provides you with two file systems to choose from: Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for enterprise workloads and Amazon FSx for Lustre for high-performance workloads.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform provides a cloud-native global file system over public and private object storage, revolutionizing the world of hybrid cloud data solutions. Enhanced by a rich data services ecosystem, CTERA enables enterprises to gain full control of their data for optimal edge performance, data insight, and governance. The platform focuses on security, providing features like data encryption, access controls, and ransomware protection. Centralized management tools enable efficient data control and monitoring. The platform is being used to replace legacy NAS and file servers, especially at remote locations, and simplify backup and disaster recovery of file data while providing the flexibility of multi-cloud deployments with infinite scalability. CTERA is at the core of hybrid cloud transformations of some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare organizations, global media groups, and government agencies, in deployments that scale to tens of petabytes.

CTERA

Sample Customers

Neiman Marcus, T Mobile, Docxellent, Matrix, Lyell

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI

Amazon FSx vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform