We attended SFD22 last week and one of the presenters was CTERA, (for more information please see SFD22 videos of their session) discussing their enterprise class, cloud NAS solution.
We’ve heard a lot about cloud NAS systems lately (see our/listen to our GreyBeards on Storage podcast with LucidLink from last month). Cloud NAS systems provide a NAS (SMB, NFS, and S3 object storage) front-end system that uses the cloud or onprem object storage to hold customer data which is accessed through the use of (virtual or hardware) caching appliances.
These differ from file synch and share in that Cloud NAS systems
- Don’t copy lots or all customer data to user devices, the only data that resides locally is metadata and the user’s or site’s working set (of files).
- Do cache working set data locally to provide faster access
- Do provide NFS, SMB and S3 access along with user drive, mobile app, API and web based access to customer data.
- Do provide multiple options to host user data in multiple clouds or on prem
- Do allow for some levels of collaboration on the same files
Although admittedly, the boundary lines between synch and share and Cloud NAS are starting to blur.
CTERA is a software defined solution. But, they also offer a whole gaggle of hardware options for edge filers, ranging from smart phone sized, 1TB flash cache for home office user to a multi-RU media edge server with 128TB of hybrid disk-SSD solution for 8K video editing.
They have HC100 edge filers, X-Series HCI edge servers, branch in a box, edge and Media edge filers. These later systems have specialized support for MacOS and Adobe suite systems. For their HCI edge systems they support Nutanix, Simplicity, HyperFlex and VxRail systems.
CTERA edge filers/servers can be clustered together to provide higher performance and HA. This way customers can scale-out their filers to supply whatever levels of IO performance they need. And CTERA allows customers to segregate (file workloads/directories) to be serviced by specific edge filer devices to minimize noisy neighbor performance problems.
CTERA supports a number of ways to access cloud NAS data:
- Through (virtual or real) edge filers which present NFS, SMB or S3 access protocols
- Through the use of CTERA Drive on MacOS or Windows desktop/laptop devices
- Through a mobile device app for IOS or Android
- Through their web portal
- Through their API
CTERA uses a, HA, dual redundant, Portal service which is a cloud (or on prem) service that provides CTERA metadata database, edge filer/server management and other services, such as web access, cloud drive end points, mobile apps, API, etc.
CTERA uses S3 or Azure compatible object storage for its backend, source of truth repository to hold customer file data. CTERA currently supports 36 on-prem and in cloud object storage services. Customers can have their data in multiple object storage repositories. Customer files are mapped one to one to objects.
CTERA offers global dedupe, virus scanning, policy based scheduled snapshots and end to end encryption of customer data. Encryption keys can be held in the Portals or in a KMIP service that’s connected to the Portals.
CTERA has impressive data security support. As mentioned above end-to-end data encryption but they also support dark sites, zero-trust authentication and are DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) certified.
Customer data can also be pinned to edge filers, Moreover, specific customer (director/sub-directorydirectories) data can be hosted on specific buckets so that data can:
- Stay within specified geographies,
- Support multi-cloud services to eliminate vendor lock-in
CTERA file locking is what I would call hybrid. They offer strict consistency for file locking within sites but eventual consistency for file locking across sites. There are performance tradeoffs for strict consistency, so by using a hybrid approach, they offer most of what the world needs from file locking without incurring the performance overhead of strict consistency across sites. For another way to do support hybrid file locking consistency check out LucidLink’s approach (see the GreyBeards podcast with LucidLink above).
At the end of their session Aron Brand got up and took us into a deep dive on select portions of their system software. One thing I noticed is that the portal is NOT in the data path. Once the edge filers want to access a file, the Portal provides the credential verification and points the filer(s) to the appropriate object and the filers take off from there.
CTERA’s customer list is very impressive. It seems that many (50 of WW F500) large enterprises are customers of theirs. Some of the more prominent include GE, McDonalds, US Navy, and the US Air Force.
Oh and besides supporting potentially 1000s of sites, 100K users in the same name space, and they also have intrinsic support for multi-tenancy and offer cloud data migration services. For example, one can use Portal services to migrate cloud data from one cloud object storage provider to another.
They also mentioned they are working on supplying K8S container access to CTERA’s global file system data.
There’s a lot to like in CTERA. We hadn’t heard of them before but they seem focused on enterprise’s with lots of sites, boatloads of users and massive amounts of data. It seems like our kind of storage system.
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