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DDN EXA5 vs Nasuni comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

DDN EXA5
Ranking in File System Software
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nasuni
Ranking in File System Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
NAS (14th), Cloud Migration (8th), Cloud Storage (14th), Cloud Backup (30th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (20th), Cloud Storage Gateways (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of DDN EXA5 is 3.8%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 15.9%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nasuni15.9%
DDN EXA53.8%
Other80.3%
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2544219 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Enhancing AI cluster training with reliable performance and good customer service
This is for AI training cluster. The customer is using DDN as a default de facto standard for their AI cluster DDN is one of the storages actually supporting by NVIDIA Superport. The customer is using NVIDIA Superport, which helps in terms of scalability. The DDN Exascaler uses a parallel file…
ShailenderSingh1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Unified cloud file storage has simplified global data management and reduced operational overhead
From an admin perspective, Nasuni has various valuable features. The GUI is very good, upgrading is very easy, and DFS is very easily manageable. Compared with other products, the snapshot feature is beneficial because it creates a snapshot every five minutes, allowing me to provide restores very easily to customers. Data protection is enhanced by the fact that Nasuni uses S3 technology to create snapshots every five minutes and enables versioning, so the snapshot is created and I can utilize that snapshot for disaster recovery or restore purposes. I assess the value of global file locking and caching for reducing latency as good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The DDN Exascaler uses a parallel file system, Lustre, which is proven for HPC and AI workloads."
"The performance is outstanding, and customers are very happy with it."
"Nasuni reduced our overall storage footprint at our sites by 70 to 80 percent."
"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."
"We have absolutely seen an ROI, and we are super happy with our ROI."
"The snapshot functionality and the unified file system are definitely the most valuable features for us. The UFS allows everybody across the organization to see the exact same data at the same time, instead of having different file servers with different structures on them, and that's mission-critical. We have different branches throughout our organization that have to act on that data."
"A big advantage is having the data exist in the cloud, which has certainly relieved a lot of pressure from our IT department in regards to having a backup as well as preventing some ransomware in all of our offices."
"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's unified file storage approach helps my customers manage data across global locations because the unified file version is very supportive, allowing management from a single console without the need to log in on every box."
 

Cons

"There are challenges with the operation cost and upgrading process, which is disruptive, especially with the node."
"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."
"When we have to rebuild a filer or put a new one at a site, one of the things that I would like to be able to do is just repoint the data from Azure to it. As it is now, you need to copy it using a method like Robocopy."
"We would like to have a user desktop agent to help improve the end-user experience."
"The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it."
"Room for improvement would be the speed of replication of new files. I would also like to see cloud mirroring."
"I would like to see improvement in the training Nasuni provides. Compared to some of the other vendors out there, like Microsoft, where you can find how-to videos, Nasuni only has a lot of PDF documents that you have to go hunting for. It's workable, it certainly isn't a problem, but video walkthroughs would always be helpful."
"One area that we've recently spoken to Nasuni about is single sign-on. Another is integrating Nasuni with Azure Active Directory. In our particular case, that would allow for third-party consultants to access our Azure Active Directory environment as opposed to coming to our on-premises environment."
"Customer support and response time on issues should be improved because their support can be hard to get in touch with and we have to wait for a long time to get a call back."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"It is around $850 per terabyte per year. Any additional costs that you would incur are for the local caching devices that you'll need to access Nasuni. You kind of provide your own virtual machines or compute to access the data. You also pay for the object storage. So, there are three parts to it. There is the Nasuni license per terabyte. You would also pay for the actual object storage in the cloud, and then you would pay for virtual machines to access the storage."
"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."
"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."
"Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low."
"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."
"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."
"The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD per terabyte."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DDN EXA5?
The cost is higher compared to other offerings, but the performance is good. The challenge in comparison to other offerings is that DDN is a little bit expensive.
What needs improvement with DDN EXA5?
There are challenges with the operation cost and upgrading process, which is disruptive, especially with the node. Some customers have moved away due to these operational issues.
What is your primary use case for DDN EXA5?
This is for AI training cluster. The customer is using DDN as a default de facto standard for their AI cluster.
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&...
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 be...
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 ca...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

EXA5
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ICR, Recursion, Toyota Technical Development Corporation (TTDC), Deluxe, Buff Dubs
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 CTERA, Panzura, Nasuni and others in File System Software. Updated: October 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.