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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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NAS (12th), Cloud Migration (6th), Cloud Storage (14th), Cloud Backup (35th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (19th), Cloud Storage Gateways (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 5.4%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 17.1%, down from 27.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nasuni17.1%
Cohesity SpanFS5.4%
Other77.5%
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

SM
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.
reviewer1822371 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Cloud data management that achieves cost efficiency with advanced data protection features
I am currently using Nasuni for seismic data. We have a huge data size, and we want to reduce costs. Nasuni acts as a caching solution, so we put some data into the cache, and the rest goes to the blob, which helps us save on costs. We use it for applications like Petrol and Tech Log, where 3D…

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."
"We switched over to it because it is an integrated solution that includes DataProtect and the platform, has other use cases for enterprise search, and can also do things like antivirus."
"It has snapshot capabilities. We take advantage of those."
"With Nasuni, we have been able to replace multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system, which is important to us because we have been able to consolidate several different products and solutions."
"Nasuni is tremendously easy to manage. It eliminates many of the administrative challenges associated with physical hardware storage, and you don't need to worry about any hardware failure or products reaching the end of their lives."
"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."
"Nasuni has helped to replace multiple data silos with a single global file system, providing a single platform with a 360-degree view of our data so we can secure it properly, ensure resiliency, and maintain the visibility required for strict regulations like GDPR."
"We've used it to provide file source capacity for VDI environments. The security of it is important and the fact that it's object storage, it's immutable and that it can't be held for ransom. It's a lot smoother than our previous processes that weren't Nasuni-based. A lot of it is done automatically just by the system being in place."
"Nasuni is helping us replace multiple data silos and toolsets with a single global file system."
"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."
"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."
 

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 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."
"I would like to see Nasuni create a Dropbox or Box alternative. One of the things that people like about those tools is that they are very easy to implement. They look just like a file server. With Nasuni, you have to be online to get your file storage. With Dropbox, there is a thing running on your PC that downloads the files to it when you need them, i.e., an agent."
"Some applications may not be suited for the Nasuni environment. You may need something with better performance. Otherwise, if you want to run daily operations or some file system, it's a good bet."
"They could lower the cost, but it saves so much money when you go into it (by losing all the backup)."
"The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it."
"Its interface design or the graphic user interface design can be slightly tweaked in some areas. Some built-in setup wizards would be very beneficial. Rather than having to go in and configure it by hand, there should be more setup wizards for onboarding new data shares and getting it set up the way you want. I don't know if these are on their roadmap, but I sat down and talked to them about some of the work concerns, some of the things that we liked, and some of the things that we didn't like. They are probably working on that."
"One thing to consider is that Nasuni will have the same limitations that a traditional file storage solution will have, although that is because they are taking the place of a traditional architectural model. For example, Office 365 supports collaboration on documents such as Excel files and Word documents, but because Nasuni is a traditional file server, in that sense, it can't make use of that functionality."
"Room for improvement would be the speed of replication of new files. I would also like to see cloud mirroring."
 

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."
"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."
"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 has a license fee as well as hardware costs, which we would incur if we want to use Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway for upgrades."
"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."
"Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license."
"The cost of licensing is negotiated and billed annually per terabyte."
"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
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
 

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 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.