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: June 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

9th

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 (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

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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Barry Sunanan

Senior Architect - Data and Solutions at Wipro Limited

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.

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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."

"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of the backup and restore functions."

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

"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."

"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 biggest and most impressive thing for us is the operational recovery (OR) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities that Nasuni has. If a filer goes down, or an ESX server goes down, then we can quickly recover."

"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."

"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."

"The nice thing about Nasuni storage is that it is immutable. This means the data is only written once. So, you never modify the files. When you write a file out to the storage, it doesn't modify it when you change it. The technology knows how to figure out what the difference is between the original file write and what the changes are. Therefore, it only saves the changes."

More Nasuni pros

Cons

"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 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."

"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."

"Nasuni could improve cloud integration and documentation of various ways we can leverage the product. It integrates with Azure, but the native Azure File Sync solution lets you divide data into tiers like hot, cool, and archived. Nasuni doesn't allow you to break the data apart into those tiered categories."

"When we first set up our bandwidth limiting, we had a few problems when it came to managing it. This is something that could be made easier; however, we were able to make the changes that we needed to for our environment."

"Nasuni does not support different retention policies within the same volume, so you have to keep creating volumes for retention policies. When you create a new volume, it means you're starting from zero all over again. You can't move data between two volumes. You have to move them from your physical device to Nasuni or your cloud device to Nasuni."

"The speed at which new files are created is something that could be improved. For example, if you create a new file in another country, I won't see it for between 10 and 15 minutes."

"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."

"When users from one office save their changes, their peers in another office can see the changes within minutes. Of course, this is an area for constant improvement and we hope that they can still reduce the amount of time it takes to replicate changes."

"The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it."

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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

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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

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

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