Gartner has a huge influence over IT purchasing, and as a result vendors the world over beat a path to the company’s Stamford, Conn., headquarters seeking an audience.
There are two main blessings Gartner can bestow – to be put in the analyst firm’s Magic Quadrant or called a ‘Cool Vendor,’ notwithstanding the fact that the word vendor is anything but cool.
CTERA has the second blessing. In fact, the market that CTERA serves, hybrid storage where you have a backup appliance on-premises and a further tier of backup in the cloud, is itself kind of cool.
The gurus at Gartner apparently are fans of this approach as well, and chose CTERA as one of five Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies for this year. Other cool storage vendors include Delphix, Panzura, Pure Storage, and Scality.
So what makes CTERA cool? Let’s let the company brag, er, explain: “The Cloud Attached Storage architecture combines secure cloud storage services with on-premises appliances and managed agents,” the company said, claiming that “CTERA pioneered the cloud storage gateway concept, with tens of thousands of units deployed, and its scalable cloud service delivery platform is used by leading service providers and enterprises, on the public or private cloud infrastructure of their choice.”
The CTERA solution set supports both private and public clouds and is based on cloud storage gateway appliances, which are really network attached storage (NAS) boxes installed on-premises. This data is then further backed up using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
CTERA has a new partner to drive this technology into the U.S. federal market in the form of MSP Cloud49, a partnership recently reported by MSP Today.
Before we dig into Gartner, let’s hear more of what CTERA had to say.
“Our enterprise customers use our integrated platform to extend cloud storage to remote sites and mobile users, while realizing as much as 80 percent reduction in storage costs. We believe Gartner's inclusion of CTERA in this report is a significant validation of our vision and execution,” said Liran Eshel, CEO of CTERA.
Gartner expands on that thought, explaining that “CTERA Networks offers unique, unified cloud storage integration hardware and software (including EFSS) within an expanding partner ecosystem.”
Based on that simple analysis, Gartner believes IT, when thinking about using public or cloud storage for mobile workers and remote branch offices, should look at CTERA solutions.
Gartner believes the CTERA goods are particularly suited for SMBs, but also have a place amongst service providers, who base services upon the CTERA platform, as well as integrators and enterprises. Pretty broad customer brush!
“The CTERA Networks offerings address file sync and share, backup and primary data delivery using on-premises hardware optimized to transport data to a public or private cloud environment. The company uniquely offers a cost-efficient solution to support remote and branch office (ROBO) environments on a large scale,” Gartner explained. “The lightweight local footprint of a CTERA Networks storage unit, the elimination of additional backup software and the resultant operational simplification make CTERA Networks an attractive solution for supporting extensive ROBO environments.”
CTERA is building up its overall presence with the help of partners, and the affordability of its tools. “The partnership ecosystem continues to expand with native integration of CTERA Networks' capability into the CISCO Integrated Service Routers Generation 2 (ISR), integration with EMC's Atmos, IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS), Hitachi Data Systems' Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), Dell DX, OpenStack Swift and many relationships with telcos and MSPs in Europe and the U.S,” Gartner argued.
But CTERA isn’t on easy street yet. “CTERA Networks is a relatively new company, founded in 2008 and competing in an intensely active segment of the market. Their presence is growing in the U.S. with SMB customers (from a revenue perspective) and in Europe with a number of large telco and communication service provider (CSP) partners. As a small but fast-growing company, risk exists that CTERA Networks may struggle to adequately deliver in a timely manner to its diverse customer set,” Gartner added.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
