CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Cohesity SpanFS comparison

Cohesity and CTERA are both solutions in the File System Software category. Cohesity is ranked #7 with an average rating of 10.0, while CTERA is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.3. Cohesity holds a 3.4% mindshare in FSS, compared to CTERA’s 7.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of CTERA users are willing to recommend the solution.

Cohesity SpanFS

Read 2 Cohesity SpanFS reviews

350 Views
206 Comparison Views

0% willing to recommend

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Read 9 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform reviews

684 Views
283 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cohesity SpanFS

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cohesity SpanFS and CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two File System Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

March 2025

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Helped 841,431 peers since 2012

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

3rd

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 (13th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (9th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd), Content Collaboration Platforms (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 3.4%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 7.6%, 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

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

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

"Our main reason for going for this solution was the uncontrollable growth of file data. It was unsustainable on our previous platform or technology. We needed something scalable like CTERA, so it was the scalability that we required."

"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."

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

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

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

"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."

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

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"It has a learning curve."

"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."

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

"The web portal that our users access to view data and backups could be optimized. CTERA could apply some of the improvements made to their administrative interface on the user side. The administrators are a much smaller group of people than the users, so it would be helpful if they targeted user experience resources to them."

"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."

"One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, but they do not give us any further information. I would like to have more information on the logs themselves."

"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."

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."

"So far, pricing seems to be fine."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Real Estate/Law Firm

12%

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.

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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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cohesity SpanFS?

See all answers

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

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, ...

See all answers

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

We use CTERA in almost every site we use. It is the platform for every commercial site that we have in the world. We have around 198 of their devices locally, and we also have CTERA devices in our ...

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

File System Software

February 2025

Download Cohesity SpanFS product report

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

March 2025

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product 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

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

March 2025

Free Report: CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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