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CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued) vs. FreeNAS

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ACTERA offered a cloud storage gateway and NAS appliance the Edge X Series. The product line has been discontinued.N/A

    FreeNAS

    Score5.4 out of 10
    N/AFreeNAS is an open source operating system that allows nearly any hardware serve as a network-attached storage device. It was developed by iXsystems.N/A
    Pricing
    CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)FreeNAS
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    DiskStation
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    Medium-sized Companies
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    Enterprises
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    Score8.8 out of 10
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    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Likelihood to Recommend
    1.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)FreeNAS
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    This is all about the selling you a "Device" and prices vary greatly between resellers. The devices work well, but the pure cloud solutions need a lot of work.
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    FreeNAS is well suited for most storage serving scenarios, whether it be for an office file server, backup destinations, data replication across the internet, or as backend storage for virtual machines. It can serve various types of clients via a plethora of standard protocols and can easily integrate with existing infrastructure using LDAP authentication and so on. It's pretty simple to use (it helps to have at least a basic understanding of the underlying technologies) and almost maintenance-free. One scenario that springs to mind that it may not be appropriate for (yet) is as S3 storage. However, S3 functionality was added in a recent release and may have improved greatly since then. I'm sure it will eventually work very well for this.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • Standard File Backup
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    iXsystems
    • The FreeNAS web interface is modern looking. It makes tasks like provisioning drives into raid volumes easy.
    • The ZFS raid option allows you to add in an SSD as a cache drive to increase performance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • SQL Backups just don't work reliably. For us, we lost all of our SQL data backed up through the CTERA Application process. Although the logs indicated a success, that was really not the case. This came close to putting us out of business. Luckily I had taken a genuine SQL backup to a folder. Unfortunately it was a month old. We had to pick-up the pieces from there.
    • Don't use it for file sync and share. There are better products out there i.e. anchorworks.com
    • Support sucks. Good luck with response time and answers that are inconsistent between team members. For example I had to rebuild a VM from scratch. When I re-installed the CTERA client It obviously thought I was adding another device. When I inquired to tech support, one member said "copy the old Data folder" (I still had the old VHD. That did not work). The other directed me to the correct spot to just change the associated folder. The turn-around time was over 24 hours for this simple fix.
    • Documentation, plenty of fodder but no real tech there.
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    iXsystems
    • Not good for beginners as it requires deep understanding of networking and storage.
    • Most of the good and required features are not available in free version.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    iXsystems
    There were some things that can be found by other users on forums and Google and some things that were not.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Unfortunately CTERA does not stack up well if you want a pure cloud BDR. I have use iDrive and Asigra. iDrive has similar support and SQL backup issues. Asigra can vary widely in support and price, but the software is solid.
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    FreeNAS effectively uses all resources really well and it is highly recommended for in premises NAS. It has unlimited ROI as it is really free and open-source. The only payment we need to pay is when we need any support from those guys. FreeNAS helps us to effectively do our work with the legacy systems as it manages all the components really well. FreeNAS although rebranded to TrueNAS will still be there until our legacy systems run.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • NONE, it about put us out of business
    Read full review
    iXsystems
    • Low-Cost Network Attached Storage
    • Provides additional network storage to support client & business operations
    • FreeNAS secures our data using custom encryption keys
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots