CTERA scanned 16 petabytes of live enterprise file data and found just 4.4% of capacity actively used, with 83.1% of capacity held in files untouched for over a year. In a market of rising flash prices that is a buying decision, not a housekeeping one.
What was announced
- CTERA analysed 16 petabytes of live production data across 856 file share discovery scans in enterprise NAS environments, including regulated industries.
- Just 4.4% of stored capacity was actively used.
- 83.1% of total stored capacity sits in files not modified in more than one year, and 97.5% of individual files had not been modified in more than a year.
- 88% of individual files had not been accessed in more than a year, and only 9.9% of stored data was accessed in any given 90 day period.
- CTERA CTO Aron Brand describes enterprises running their most expensive storage tier as what is effectively a cold archive, with knock on cost in backup, replication and security exposure.
The ETON view
Read that alongside pricing: enterprise SSD contract prices have been climbing all year and server DRAM is up 13 to 18% quarter on quarter in 3Q26. If 95% of what sits on your primary tier has not been touched in a year, every price rise is being paid on data nobody reads, and paid again through every backup, snapshot and replication pass that protects it.
The practical move is boring and it works: profile the estate, then buy for the shape you actually have. Hot working set on NVMe flash, everything else on high capacity nearline or tape, with the archive tier bought on capacity per pound rather than IOPS. That usually means a used or refurbished JBOD, expansion shelf or tape library alongside a smaller new flash purchase, and it releases flash you already own instead of ordering more of it at 2026 prices.
This is where vendor neutrality earns its keep. We will price HPE, Dell, Supermicro and GIGABYTE storage platforms against each other, quote drives and caddies separately so you are not paying a vendor uplift on capacity you could source directly, and give firm lead times on refurbished shelves that are usually days rather than the months quoted on new flash. If you want the estate measured first, we can help scope that before anything is bought.
Related infrastructure
Category: Storage · Vendor: CTERA · Technology: NAS, file storage, archive tiering · Last verified: 16 Sep 2026 · ~2 min read
Sourcing this kind of infrastructure? Talk to ETON about availability, lead time and pricing.
