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Cohesity SpanFS vs Nasuni comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

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
9th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
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
36
Ranking in other categories
NAS (6th), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (4th), Cloud Backup (15th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (10th), Cloud Storage Gateways (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 3.8%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 27.9%, up from 24.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

SM
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.
Barry Sunanan - PeerSpot reviewer
It helped us save 40 to 45 percent on some types of data
It can provide a 360-degree view of your data, depending on how you implement it and whether you're storing your data in Nasuni. However, if you're working with multiple cloud providers, I don't think it's mature enough to provide a 360-degree view of what's in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. I think it can do it, but it's still a lot of scope and range fitting. Given that Nasuni storage is actually cheaper in some areas, it made sense for us to move a lot of our data away from Microsoft. Nasuni gave us more of a 360 view of that particular data type. Other data types are a little different because the company went in a direction where they wanted to store some stuff in an AWS S3 bucket rather than a file storage system. An S3 bucket has its advantages, but if you were to store more of your data in Nasuni, you would get a wider 360-degree view of it rather than on several cloud providers. I have data in AWS, Google, and Azure, and I would like to see a wider view of all the data stored across these three top providers. Currently, I use it for AWS and Azure, but I couldn't use both of them at the same time. I think Nasuni could have better visibility across these different areas. I had to take my data out and then do some analysis to get the costs. It would be helpful to have more built-in analytics tools to compare the storage costs between the various cloud providers. I would also like some graphing capabilities. We had a tool called Grafana that we used for graphing. I think some more visual analytics like that would be nice.

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."
"It has the ability to do end-user recovery, or a user can simply contact an admin who can perform a recovery from the management console. The versioning has simplified everything. Now we don't have to worry about those components."
"Nasuni has helped to eliminate on-premises infrastructure. We were using about eight to 10 different types of vendors or small storage boxes for provisioning and shared access for users. We got rid of all those. That has eliminated operational overhead and footprint at our data center. We don't have to worry about any hardware or monitoring particular devices, and hundreds of devices have been decommissioned. Now, for provisioning, everything is on Nasuni. I assume this has made a big difference in costs."
"The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection."
"Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information."
"My clients are happy with Nasuni because the transmission is seamless, and it consolidates all the existing file servers into one location. Also, Nasuni has no boundaries. It's infinitely expandable. They don't have to rely on the service provider for backup and restoration. It's self-serve."
"We use Nasuni's continuous file versioning feature and it fully protects us. With the ability to version files and have continuous recovery, it helps in terms of resiliency. If we have an incident then we would be able to easily recover from it by using the technology."
"We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files. Nasuni has reduced the friction and noise associated with file management because the devices are more reliable."
"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."
 

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 only thing that I'd like to see is more support for platforms like OneDrive or Box.com."
"The performance of the filesystem could be improved."
"There are some issues with multiple users accessing the same file simultaneously. There would be times when the global file would lock when several people tried to access it, so that could be optimized more."
"There is some room for improvement when it comes to monitoring. We are not using Nasuni monitoring. We are using our own monitoring through Xenos. Nasuni can provide better monitoring capabilities for us to monitor all the filers and NMC so that we don't have to use a third-party tool."
"Migration from existing systems, specifically StorSimple, could be improved, but that solution will be end-of-life by the end of the year. Also, the documentation could be more accessible."
"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."
"We would like to have a user desktop agent to help improve the end-user experience."
"Some of their cross-platform features are really good, but it could always use more."
 

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."
"Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low."
"Our agreement is set up such that we pay annually per terabyte, and we buy a chunk of it at a time. Then if we run out of space, we go back to them and buy another chunk."
"It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap."
"I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable."
"It has a license fee as well as hardware costs, which we would incur if we want to use Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway for upgrades."
"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."
"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."
"Its pricing can get a tad expensive. When we first took Nasuni out, we were just paying for the service. We got storage at a reduced rate. It has now changed, and they're now more of an all-in-one type of thing. It can be quite expensive, but it works out. Apart from that, licensing-wise, it's very simple."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Real Estate/Law Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

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?
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...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SpanFS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tribune Media
American Standard, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, E*TRADE, Ithaca Energy, McLaren Construction, Morton Salt, Movado, Urban Outfitters, Western Digital
Find out what your peers are saying about Cohesity SpanFS vs. Nasuni and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.