At first glance, CTERA’s appliance appears to be the same as other storage gateway products. Their claim, however, is that they offer much more functionality than the typical storage gateway and they do so at a fraction of the cost. This claim might not make sense on the surface, but once one examines things a little deeper, it seems possible. CTERA has created a quite extensive set of tools in one package, including an SMB/NFS server that backs itself up, backup software that backs up other systems to that server, and a file sync and share service. To that list they have now added the ability to back up public cloud environments. Doing all this at a cost less than their competitors is quite a feat.