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: April 2025).

Cohesity SpanFS vs. Nasuni

April 2025

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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

5th

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 (6th), Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Storage (3rd), Cloud Backup (14th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (9th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 3.9%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 28.1%, up from 24.9% 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."

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery. We can fully recover a site in two hours."

"We like Nasuni's snapshot technology. The snapshot and recovery features are the things we use most frequently. Ideally, I would recommend NFS or CFS, which gives you more benefits for clients or anyone who wants to access FTP protocol, FTP utilities, SAN, and MSS."

"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."

"The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection."

"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."

"Continuous File Versioning is one of the best features because it helps you to restore at any point in time. That means you don't have to worry about a ransomware attack. Even if that attack happens, you can restore all the data to five minutes ago and save everything."

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."

"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."

"As administrators, we are used to having control equal to managing an on-prem device. In terms of log analysis and other things we want to do, Nasuni has some limitations limitation on what you do on the Nasuni. Nasuni could add some features to the GUI that make administration a little easier. It's tough when I have to move from one filter to another because there is no way to search it. We have to scroll up and down to find the name of it."

"Nasuni recently implemented a health system for filers. However, it needs better visibility because it lacks data and an explanation, or reasoning as to why a particular filer may be unhealthy."

"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."

"We've had some organizational changes that Nasuni has not been able to keep up with, mainly from a data or file system perspective. Moving a filer from one management console has been a challenge. It lacks the flexibility to move files in and out of the management console. We have six management consoles now, and we're constantly telling Nasuni, "Hey, please allow us to move a filer from management console A to B." They can't do that."

"I suggest Nasuni improve their syslog forwarders to support TCP protocol, as it's more secure than UDP, which is plain text and not protected at all."

"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."

"The privilege settings need to be more granular, and alerts are an excellent example. If a user doesn't have access to them, they can't see them and access information such as what they may have done wrong, what's there, and when the last sync happened. However, the ability to view alerts also comes with permission to delete them, which is not good, so we need more customization options here."

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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD 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."

"With this solution, the license renewal is pretty swift. With the virtual appliance, you just need to take care of the OS versions and patches. In a way, we don't have to struggle much with renewals because the only thing that we need to take care of are the licenses. We renew it every three years. This aspect goes with infrastructural costs because it doesn't cost us too much to maintain the solution."

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Real Estate/Law Firm

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

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

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File System Software

May 2025

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May 2025

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