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NetApp FAS Series vs Panzura CloudFS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 24, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.8
NetApp FAS Series offers efficient storage, cost savings, and satisfaction, especially in VMware environments, despite high expansion costs.
Sentiment score
5.1
Organizations experienced enhanced resilience, doubled performance, and productivity gains by adopting Panzura CloudFS, solving past file storage issues.
If you have the configuration well maintained and configured, you should have good efficiency and compression for the clients and for yourself.
Previously, we had latency issues with syncing up files between offices. Files were not locked, leading to overwrites which cost us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and revenue.
We saw the benefits of Panzura CloudFS immediately because our remote offices were able to share files immediately after the product went live.
Panzura CloudFS saves us a significant amount of time frequently.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
NetApp FAS Series customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, though regional availability and resolution streamlining can improve.
Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS support is praised for quick, expert assistance despite occasional delays, receiving high ratings from users.
Sometimes, the support was inadequate because the initial architecture was poorly defined.
We are also using it ourselves for the SAN and CIFS protocol.
They often provide basic solutions, such as suggesting a failover or a power cycle, which are not the sophisticated solutions we expect from a vendor.
The support staff and the number of people they have on staff right now are truly good.
When we have a priority-one issue, we typically receive a call within 20 to 30 minutes.
I would give the support for Panzura CloudFS a ten out of ten because they are responsive and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
NetApp FAS Series offers seamless scalability, integrating old and new components for medium to large enterprises despite potential cost issues.
Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS is highly scalable, effortlessly supports many users across locations, with seamless deployment and dedicated support.
We normally avoid current versions and use versions that have been running for at least two months in client usage before updating drivers.
NetApp FAS Series is scalable, and it is possible, but you need to pay.
The NetApp FAS Series is scalable and offers numerous solutions, but only if customers are willing to invest in the shelves.
Unlimited users can access the system without issues.
From our original entry with Panzura CloudFS, we have added an additional seven sites, and deploying those additional nodes was very seamless and did not take any effort.
The latest version, 8.0.2, has better ease of decommissioning filers and bringing new ones online.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
The NetApp FAS Series is praised for stability and reliability, with users noting minimal issues and high performance.
Sentiment score
6.1
Panzura CloudFS is highly stable with rare outages and improved reliability, earning high user ratings overall.
When panic occurs on the node, it reboots itself, and we have experienced numerous hardware-related issues.
Most things are tailor-made, and we avoid downtimes even with primitive CLI commands.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
We have never had their system crash on us.
There were times with file lock issues between filers, causing various anomalies, but with their ongoing development, these issues have improved.
 

Room For Improvement

NetApp FAS Series needs enhancements in flexibility, pricing, integration, performance, documentation, support, virtualization, and scalability to address user concerns.
Panzura CloudFS needs improvements in performance, compatibility, pricing, dashboard, alerting, licensing, Active Directory reliance, NFS service, and support.
Storage companies should create encrypted storage solutions between the OS and storage to protect against ransomware attacks.
Nutanix leads the business in this approach, and I feel that NetApp is missing some aspects, such as CPU, GPU, and RAM, in its AI portfolio.
There is an opportunity there for NetApp with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
When something goes wrong somewhere, there should be a little bit better alerting with issues before they become a big problem.
The GIS data formats, such as a geo database, have been found better kept outside of Panzura CloudFS.
It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly.
 

Setup Cost

NetApp FAS Series is pricey but offers good ROI and savings through bundled licensing, with support impacting overall costs.
Panzura CloudFS pricing is higher than competitors, lacks granular licenses, but offers negotiation flexibility and transparency.
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable.
It did require us to purchase new hardware, however, that was not overly expensive.
They should consider more attractive pricing for companies of our size.
Overall, it is quite costly compared to NetApp and similar solutions.
 

Valuable Features

NetApp FAS Series excels in high availability, integration, and efficient storage solutions, featuring robust disaster recovery and unified storage.
Panzura CloudFS enhances workflows with high availability, security, and seamless collaboration, reducing storage costs and boosting productivity.
While NVMe disks are expensive and require three disks for parity calculations, hard drives in NetApp FAS Series are inexpensive, making it more cost-efficient per GB, even with RAID tech implementation.
Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k.
One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments.
It is very reliable and very quick.
It helps us increase network resilience. We have a primary object library stored in the cloud and have Panzura Mirroring which allows us to place data in a secondary cloud for added resiliency.
There is no degradation of speed because these filers have cached the data, and they are constantly swapping metadata and updating with each other, which is a very attractive method of getting us to use these applications.
 

Categories and Ranking

NetApp FAS Series
Ranking in NAS
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (3rd), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (1st)
Panzura CloudFS
Ranking in NAS
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (3rd), Cloud Storage (12th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of NetApp FAS Series is 10.7%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Panzura CloudFS is 3.1%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NetApp FAS Series10.7%
Panzura CloudFS3.1%
Other86.2%
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Srikanth Purushothaman - PeerSpot reviewer
Has supported long-term data protection and backup while requiring better part availability and pricing options
For monitoring purposes, we normally use flash access storage exclusively. We utilize a hybrid system because we need performance, combining NL-SAS for the volume and SAS flash to use as a fast cache system that provides more IOPS. We normally implement RAID 10, which we prefer over RAID 6's n plus 2 combinations. We utilize it for data redundancy, even with write intensity on. Regarding the unified storage architecture for NetApp FAS Series, we normally opt for exclusivity unless budget constraints exist. Our IOPS are very high, reaching somewhere about 50k to 150k or 1.150k. The high performance ensures minimal latency. An advantage we've seen with NetApp FAS Series is that snapshots provide very rapid backup and fast recovery. We basically use snapshots for data protection as first-level protection, with deduplication between the two storages serving as second-level protection.
Roger Clark - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles file locks effectively enabling seamless remote collaboration in global teams
It has not reduced the data storage cost. We have been trying to come up with a plan internally to archive project data at a certain time frame. However, our data continues to grow, so at the point of 25 terabytes, we had to buy another 25 terabytes license to exceed that threshold. It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly. It would be nice if Panzura offered data in increments instead of 25 terabytes per license. They have done a pretty good job of development from the point of offering new products. Pricing seems to be high for certain things, such as the audit feature of Panzura Data Services. It would be nice to see who deleted that 100 gig of data out there. They should make the pricing plan more attractive for a company of our size. We have almost 700 employees over the southeast from Texas to Florida and up to Tennessee, so we are a pretty big region.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Construction Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise37
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?
Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?
The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They fo...
What are the products that Panzura provides?
Panzura offers four main products: CloudFS, data services, smart apps, and global services. They call this "all-in-one solution" and it's for end-to-end cloud data management. Why is it called that...
What kind of industries does Panzura serve?
Hello, I think businesses from all industries that have their data on a cloud can benefit from Panzura. Especially if you have offices in various locations or your employees are working from home a...
Why was Panzura acquired? Is the acquisition going to cause a change?
I think Panzura may change in a positive direction now that it's been bought by Profile Capital. That's a very big investment company for technology businesses and I think it's an opportunity for ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Panzura Freedom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College
Petrofac, Komatsu, HCA Healthcare, Vanguard, Disney, Pokemon, US Department of Justice, Gensler, Fluor, AFRY, Milwaukee Tool, Navy Federal Credit Union, TechTarget
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp FAS Series vs. Panzura CloudFS and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.