Cohesity SpanFS vs Nasuni comparison

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Cohesity SpanFS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Nasuni and Cohesity SpanFS are both competitive storage solutions. Users appear happier with the pricing of Nasuni, but many feel that Cohesity SpanFS offers superior features, making it worth the higher price.

Features: Nasuni is praised for its efficient global file locking and expansive cloud support. It’s known for its cost-effectiveness. Users value Cohesity SpanFS for its robust data protection, seamless scalability, and advanced data management capabilities. Cohesity SpanFS stands out in data protection compared to Nasuni.

Room for Improvement: Nasuni users suggest enhancements in its synchronization speed and usability for large files. They seek improvements in overall product reliability. Cohesity SpanFS users seek better integration with third-party applications and enhancements in product reliability. They also desire improvements in the user interface for ease of use.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nasuni is highlighted for its straightforward deployment and responsive support team. Cohesity SpanFS, while having a more complex deployment process, is commended for its comprehensive customer support once systems are up and running. Nasuni offers an easier deployment experience whereas Cohesity SpanFS ensures thorough post-deployment support.

Pricing and ROI: Nasuni users find the setup cost reasonable and mention a satisfactory ROI. Cohesity SpanFS, while more expensive to set up, provides a higher ROI according to user reviews. Nasuni is seen as a cost-effective option whereas Cohesity SpanFS is viewed as an investment for long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed Cohesity SpanFS vs. Nasuni Report (Updated: March 2025).

Cohesity SpanFS vs. Nasuni

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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

Nasuni

Ranking in File System Software

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NAS (5th), Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Storage (3rd), Cloud Backup (8th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)

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 Nasuni is 26.5%, up from 25.5% 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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Richard McGregor

Global Server & Storage Manager at Conde Nast Publications

Removes a lot of infrastructure, allows us to restore files instantly, and is simple to work with

I particularly like the restore process. Our financial teams make changes to spreadsheets and other files, and we've got teams using Photoshop files. They make mistakes and need to recover files, and we can do that instantly. We also have users who manage to delete folders, and we can bring them back instantly within a few seconds. Knowing that it's all protected from ransomware is also a very big advantage at the moment with the number of ransomware attacks that you see out there. Nasuni is being very protective of that, which is quite good to hear. There were times when we had to replace the filers we've had issues with, and because we know all our data is protected in AWS, we could just turn them off and spin them up. As quickly as in an hour or so, we were back working with zero downtime. That area of functionality is really good. In terms of ease of management, it's the easiest one you can use. It's very simple. It's very easy to set up, very easy to configure, and very easy to manage.

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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."

"Another helpful feature, in addition to restoring a file that was deleted within 24 to 48 hours, is that we have the ability to restore a file or a folder that was deleted, going all the way back to the inception of that file or folder. That means we actually have unlimited backups to the inception point of data with Nasuni."

"With Nasuni Management Console (NMC), we get a single, centralized view of our entire internal structure and data center structure. This is very important because this caters to remote locations. One of the main care center teams is dependent on this solution. As it is directly connected to customers for the calls that they receive and troubleshoot, they can then help customers out in case they are not able to place an order."

"The feature I have found to be most valuable is the revision control of the files. If somebody deletes or accidentally makes a wrong change to files, we can go back to the revision history and restore the previous versions. That is a very good feature that we rely on."

"Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information."

"The most valuable feature is the storage in that it only keeps the last-used data locally, while everything else is backed up to the cloud. That way, we never really have to worry about file space in each office or the replication to the other file servers for DR."

"The most valuable feature is that we have redundancy in our data. It's nice to know that it is cached both locally on the filters, as well as stored on that cloud."

"Snapshot backup is most valuable. It's quick and easy to use. It's controlled only by an administrator, which is very good. It takes 10 seconds to back up a spreadsheet of three or four megabytes."

"The solution gives us a breakdown and summary of every resource and each volume within every resource. It tells us the code within a given volume, so I can go in there and look at the size of the files that are stored there. Nasuni gives me the big picture and allows me to connect things like Power BI to any endpoint. I can take that tabular information from Nasuni and look at it in a graph."

More Nasuni 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."

"The Nasuni file storage platform doesn't work well when there are a high number of small files. This is the case when a directory structure contains more than 10,000 or 20,000 small files, e.g., 5 KB, 10 KB, or 15 KB. When the user is accessing these files from another geographical location, they might face a slow response or timeouts when connecting to the shares, and then to the files. This is because the file size is small. There is a scope of improvement with this solution when it comes to accessing a large number of small files."

"It is difficult to configure Nasuni. Adding a filer is an easy task, but deciding where to add them, how many to add, and what size to add takes a lot of time. I have to analyze my existing storage to understand how many users are going to access which folders. I have to design the Nasuni architecture accordingly."

"The user-friendliness of its access needs improvement. When I log into the console, I see all the files that we handle globally. There are hundreds of Nasuni files that I can see on the console, but no way that I can filter them down. While this is a small thing, I need to scroll down and select the ones that I want. "Control F" doesn't work nor is there a dropdown menu that I can click on and select the ones that I want."

"I would like to see Nasuni provide the ability to mirror a Nasuni appliance from one site to another. They could maybe have a standby appliance that is mirrored in a different location for disaster recovery purposes. We can recover if data and a Filer are lost because of a possible ransomware event, but even that takes time to recover. If we had the ability to have a mirrored appliance, we could flip over to that mirrored device and resume instantly rather than repopulate the local appliance with data from the snapshot history in the cloud. This is another feature that we would really like to see, if possible."

"Some of their cross-platform features are really good, but it could always use more."

"The performance of the filesystem could be improved."

"When we have to rebuild a filer or put a new one at a site, one of the things that I would like to be able to do is just repoint the data from Azure to it. As it is now, you need to copy it using a method like Robocopy."

"I would like to see them improve their tools in regards to accessing data using smartphones, tablets, and iPads. I think the Nasuni app could be improved to make access to the data cleaner and more efficient."

More Nasuni cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

"The pricing is fair. It's an enterprise-level solution so it's not inexpensive... The cost is pretty stable year over year."

"Its price is fair and reasonable. I don't have anything negative about its pricing and licensing. For us, there is also the cost of monitoring. We are monitoring through Xenos and not through Nasuni. That is another cost for us from the monitoring perspective, but as far as Nasuni goes, we don't have any other cost apart from the licensing fee."

"Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low."

"There are cheaper forms of storage, but Nasuni is fairly priced for the functionality it offers. I can get basic file shares provisioned in Azure and pay for the storage and the CPU. The overall cost would be much less than Nasuni, but I would need to build the management console and encryption process, so it would cost a lot to develop that kind of functionality."

"It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap."

"They could lower the cost, but it saves so much money when you go into it (by losing all the backup)."

"There are annual costs that we pay for maintaining all of the snapshot history in the cloud. That is the primary cost that we pay. We occasionally buy newer Nasuni appliances or deploy them to new offices when the need occurs. That capital equipment expenses is less than the cost of buying new file storage systems. For the most part, you are trading a CapEx cost of storage equipment for an OpEx cost for management of all the snapshot data in the cloud."

"The pricing is on par with everybody else, and fair."

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

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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

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

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?

Does Nasuni have a good pricing model?

Based on the experience of my organization, Nasuni is definitely worth the money, since it gives you an all-in-one solution where you'd usually need several programs. About the cost, there isn't a ...

Is it easy to restore files with Nasuni?

As someone who has used this feature of Nasuni I can tell you - yes, it's good for file recovery and you'll definitely benefit from very quick times. I can't tell you if it's the best one because I...

What features and services does Nasuni offer?

Hi, if you pick Nasuni, you'll be benefiting from many services for a good price. Well, it's a personalized price you get after an agreement with the company but in my organization's case, it is a ...

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Product Reports

File System Software

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Also Known As

SpanFS

No data available

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

Nasuni is a file data services enterprise focused on assisting firms with their digital transformation, global expansion, and information awareness. The Nasuni File Data Platform is a suite of cloud-based services designed to enhance user productivity, ensure business continuity, provide data intelligence, offer cloud options, and simplify global infrastructure. This platform and its auxiliary services are projected to replace conventional file infrastructure such as network attached storage (NAS), backup, and Disaster Recovery (DR), with an expandable cloud-scale solution. By storing file data in scalable cloud object storage from multiple providers, Nasuni positions itself as a cloud-native alternative for traditional NAS and file server infrastructure. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Nasuni serves sectors like manufacturing, construction, technology, oil and gas, financial services, and public sector worldwide, offering its services in more than 70 countries.

Reviews from Real Users

James J., IT Manager at a marketing services firm, says Nasuni’s management dashboard is helpful because he's able to view all of the different filers at once rather than check each one of them individually. He values the software’s security, reliability, good performance, helpful alerting, and responsive support.

According to a Server Engineering Services Lead at a mining and metals company, Nasuni offers good OR and DR capabilities, performs well, offers data security, and continuous file versioning helps recover from hardware failures.

The Managing Director of IT at a construction company appreciates Nasuni because it eliminates a lot of work that was previously done when managing backing up and restoring data files.

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

American Standard, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, E*TRADE, Ithaca Energy, McLaren Construction, Morton Salt, Movado, Urban Outfitters, Western Digital

Cohesity SpanFS vs. Nasuni