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CTERA has launched the CTERA Data Archiving Solution, which pairs its InsightAI data service with CTERA Archive so the platform can recommend which files to move off primary storage and then execute the move under retention policy and an audit trail. It’s the product follow-through to the Cold Data Storage Report CTERA published a day earlier: across 856 file-share discovery scans covering more than 16PB of live production data, 4.4% of stored capacity was data users and applications regularly access, 88.3% of files hadn’t been accessed in more than a year, and less than 10% of capacity had been touched in the prior 90 days. The solution is part of the CTERA Intelligent Data Platform. InsightAI Picks the Archive Candidates The identification step is where CTERA is putting the AI. InsightAI agents infer what a file contains from its metadata, meaning the filename, path, extension, and directory context, and assess its value to the business, then combine that with age, type, size, and usage patterns to surface archive candidates. CTERA’s argument is that age alone is a poor archiving signal; a five-year-old contract and a five-year-old build log have the same timestamp and very different retention value. InsightAI launched earlier this year as a natural-language interface for querying the platform’s file metadata, and CTERA has been steadily pointing the platform at AI workloads through its n8n integration and Fusion Direct. CTERA Archive Moves and Governs the Data Once InsightAI has flagged the files, CTERA Archive moves them to a dedicated, isolated archival tier inside the same CTERA environment, and the target can be lower-cost on-premises hardware or cloud object storage; CTERA’s product page lists Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval and other S3 storage classes along with Azure Blob Cool and Cold tiers. Because the archived files stay inside the Intelligent Data Platform, CTERA says they remain governed and reachable by AI and analytics tools with no separate retrieval or rehydration step, so cold data leaves primary storage without leaving reach. On the governance side, CTERA Archive carries configurable retention policies, with two retention modes per the product page, and logs every archive and restore operation with the operator, source, destination, reason, file count, size, and timestamp; the logs are exportable for compliance reporting and legal discovery. CTERA also frames archiving as a security control, since moving inactive data out of SMB and NFS shares shrinks the volume of sensitive information exposed in the file system, and CTERA Vault can add WORM protection to the archived set. “Enterprise data volumes are going to continue to grow, but not all data needs to remain on primary storage or be immediately accessible. The challenge has always been knowing what data can safely move and then providing a practical path to execute that migration,” said Oded Nagel, CEO of CTERA. “By pairing CTERA InsightAI, which understands what data means to the business and not just how old it is, with the governance and controls of CTERA Archive, the CTERA Data Archiving Solution gives IT teams a much simpler, AI-guided way to bring discipline to the enterprise data lifecycle without sacrificing access. Archived data stays usable for AI and analytics rather than locked away.” CTERA didn’t state availability for the Data Archiving Solution in its announcement.
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