CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Cohesity SpanFS comparison

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cohesity SpanFS

Ranking in File System Software

7th

Average Rating

10.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Ranking in File System Software

2nd

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NAS (9th), Cloud Migration (7th), Cloud Storage (10th), Cloud Backup (12th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd), Content Collaboration Platforms (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 3.3%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 7.5%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File System Software

Featured Reviews

Stefan-Motsch

Evangelist / CTO at fgnext

Along with offering competitive prices, the solution can be used by small, medium, and large businesses

While guaranteeing the strictness of the file system, there is a lot of performance involved. The performance is not as good as I expected. It's not the functionality here but the performance level. It won't be a problem if it's twice as fast. Even though its stability has room for improvement, I would recommend it to my bigger customers. The only problem is the current performance of the individual nodes. As a sale-out solution with integrated load-balancing functions, performance is in principle not a problem at all. Capacity and performance are linearly scalable over the number of nodes in the cluster. An increase in the performance of the individual nodes in future releases would be desirable.

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Igal Muginstein

Engineering & Network Division Storage, Backup & Os Team Manager at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection

The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"It has snapshot capabilities. We take advantage of those."

"The features I find most valuable are in the gateways themselves. They have done a great job over the years of providing insight into what is happening with our products, with the batches that come through that are scanned. I enjoy that part of it, and it is fairly easy to use from our standpoint once we get to know the product."

"The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is a hybrid solution that supports both on-premises and cloud environments."

"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."

"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."

"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."

"CTERA has been particularly capable of keeping all of our workstations backed up. That became a critical feature for us during the pandemic when computers were rarely in the office. Everybody went off-site with their computers, and we were accustomed to working with a centralized storage infrastructure where people would come to the office and connect to the server to use, create, and modify files. Everything was done directly to that server."

"CTERA stood out due to its ease of use and superior security features."

"CTERA's instantaneous and redundant file replication, available across multiple geographical locations, ensures easy and user-friendly recovery."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

Cons

"Its read performance can be improved. It is just slow in comparison to other file systems, but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that they have a limited number of spindles under each node."

"The only problem is the current performance of the individual nodes. As a sale-out solution with integrated load-balancing functions, performance is in principle not a problem at all. Capacity and performance are linearly scalable over the number of nodes in the cluster. An increase in the performance of the individual nodes in future releases would be desirable."

"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."

"One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy."

"They fixed all the requirements that we had in the beginning. The beginning was a little bit rough, but we tuned it nicely. However, in some cases, they could improve performance."

"It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices. We have different regions, and we must log in to each portal to see what's happening with those. It would be nice to have a single portal to see the health of the devices, versions, and firmware upgrades. Sometimes, we want to dive into something more complex, like investigating why CTERA storage usage grew from 2 terabytes to 4 terabytes in a week. That's a little challenging. It's something we would like to see on the road map."

"I am looking for a process where version upgrades do not impact the customers. There is no downtime."

"AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring. Predictive storage analytics will help with better capacity planning. There can be some sort of intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring."

"However, in some cases, they could improve performance."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I won't talk about specific numbers, but it is a little hard to compare it to other products out there because there is nobody out there that does exactly what they do. If you are just comparing it to another NAS box, it is probably going to look higher, but that's an unfair comparison because it does things that a NAS box can't do."

"When it comes to pricing, I know the prices because I am also running tenders for customers where I am not offering other solutions. Hence, the prices are pretty competitive."

"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."

"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."

"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."

"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."

"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."

"So far, pricing seems to be fine."

"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."

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845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

16%

Real Estate/Law Firm

13%

Government

Computer Software Company

70%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity SpanFS?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity SpanFS?

When it comes to pricing, I know the prices because I am also running tenders for customers where I am not offering other solutions. Hence, the prices are pretty competitive.

What needs improvement with Cohesity SpanFS?

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards.

What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy. AI and automation features could enhance the ...

What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

We use it as a hosted cloud solution. We had initially tried Azure File Sync, but that did not work. Due to certain security concerns, I was tasked with researching alternatives. I evaluated severa...

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Comparisons

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Product Reports

File System Software

Download Cohesity SpanFS product report

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product report

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Also Known As

SpanFS

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Cohesity

CTERA

Overview

Designed to combine the best of enterprise and cloud stacks, SpanFS exposes industry-standard, globally distributed NFS, SMB and S3 interfaces.

The IO Engine detects random vs. sequential IO profiles, splits the data into chunks, performs deduplication and directs to the most appropriate storage tier.

SpanFS also includes a new Metadata Store based on a consistent, distributed, NoSQL store for fast operations at scale.

SnapTree® provides a distributed meta data structure based on B+ tree concepts. It supports unlimited, frequent snapshots with no performance degradation.

Cohesity

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform provides a cloud-native global file system over public and private object storage, revolutionizing the world of hybrid cloud data solutions. Enhanced by a rich data services ecosystem, CTERA enables enterprises to gain full control of their data for optimal edge performance, data insight, and governance. The platform focuses on security, providing features like data encryption, access controls, and ransomware protection. Centralized management tools enable efficient data control and monitoring. The platform is being used to replace legacy NAS and file servers, especially at remote locations, and simplify backup and disaster recovery of file data while providing the flexibility of multi-cloud deployments with infinite scalability. CTERA is at the core of hybrid cloud transformations of some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare organizations, global media groups, and government agencies, in deployments that scale to tens of petabytes.

CTERA

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS