We performed a comparison between FreeNAS and Nasuni based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two NAS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."FreeNAS is much simpler and easier to use than other solutions, but we don't have the complete range of features that come with the full version."
"Its stability is the most valuable. It is reliable, and we don't have to worry too much about it."
"It has the best storage capacity."
"It integrates well into either Windows or Linux environments."
"The solution has been very stable so far."
"The ease of use of the 'jail', the management of backups, and copies to easily create test and pre-production scenarios have speeded up the development and distribution of business apps."
"What I like about it is that I can work on it from any computer or any device. The initial setup is very simple. The setup wizard is really helpful."
"Nasuni Management Console (NMC) is super valuable, and both physical and virtual filers are also valuable. NMC is the one-stop place for all our filers, both virtual and physical filers. They are definitely doing a great job in housing all our documents and surveillance videos."
"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 disaster recovery. We can fully recover a site in two hours."
"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."
"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."
"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 disaster recovery capabilities are very easy because their virtual appliances are just like OVFs or images. You put in a code and it collects all the configuration from the cloud and then builds up the cache. But that doesn't preclude the device from easily being restored or recovered at short notice."
"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."
"If you find the documentation, it is always incomplete and fragmented."
"The support for S3 needs to be improved."
"They should include clustering for the solution."
"The latest version of the dashboard doesn't work as good as the previous version."
"FreeNAS should be better prepared for clustering."
"They can improve the integration with PSA systems. This functionality could be better."
"The one thing that I find difficult to do which is very time-consuming is that I like to have a backup of the important files."
"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."
"The only thing that I'd like to see is more support for platforms like OneDrive or Box.com."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
FreeNAS is ranked 9th in NAS with 9 reviews while Nasuni is ranked 3rd in NAS with 35 reviews. FreeNAS is rated 8.4, while Nasuni is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of FreeNAS writes "Open-source with great disk management and task synchronization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nasuni writes "We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files". FreeNAS is most compared with StarWind Storage Appliance, Qumulo, Dell PowerScale (Isilon), HPE StoreEasy and NetApp FAS Series, whereas Nasuni is most compared with WekaFS, Panzura, CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, Qumulo and Azure NetApp Files. See our FreeNAS vs. Nasuni report.
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