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FlexPod XCS vs Oracle Exadata comparison

 

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

FlexPod XCS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (2nd)
Oracle Exadata
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
130
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

FlexPod XCS and Oracle Exadata aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. FlexPod XCS is designed for Converged Infrastructure and holds a mindshare of 12.8%, up 9.3% compared to last year.
Oracle Exadata, on the other hand, focuses on Data Warehouse, holds 7.6% mindshare, down 16.3% since last year.
Converged Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
FlexPod XCS12.8%
HPE ConvergedSystem10.8%
Oracle Private Cloud Appliance8.2%
Other68.2%
Converged Infrastructure
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Exadata7.6%
Snowflake9.5%
Teradata8.8%
Other74.1%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enforces standardized setup procedures following Certified Validated Design (CVD) guidelines and offers greater flexibility and control over the system compared to traditional systems
The GUI setup follows the right setup, meaning we have to follow the CVDi.e. Certified Validated Design. Everything is clear, because you can build CI yourself, but without rules, it can be messy. With FlexPod, there are rules to follow, making it more standardized. This helps with troubleshooting and compatibility assessments, simplifying troubleshooting significantly. We also use FlexPod pre-validated architectures to validate the design. It is very, very important to us because we had a bad case in 2015 where separate items integrated poorly due to no version or firmware compatibility certification. Troubleshooting became a nightmare. So, standards are crucial for us, and everything entering production should be verified or at least documented for certification.
Prabir Kumar Kundu - PeerSpot reviewer
SR AVP–Presales Cloud & Platform Management Services at Path Infotech ltd
Has consistently delivered high performance and aligned security while evolving with AI-driven improvements
When discussing Oracle Exadata, the main thing is the specialized database appliance, the flash cache, and the engineered machine on the database for the database itself. Overall, all the features are useful and meaningful for any database like Oracle to run the Oracle database. Regarding Smart Scan technology, it is for better performance. If a customer cannot tune their applications, this will help them to run the database and run the application without any tuning itself. Oracle Exadata's advanced compression techniques have affected my customer's data storage efficiency positively, with the feature being great, but as of now, our customer is not using that. I find its security measures align with my customer's organization, as security is aligned as per the customer's requirement. It has helped optimize performance and cost.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Deployment time is probably one of the biggest ones, as you can get it set up and start using it in a quick manner."
"We have had FlexPod for five to six years and we have not had any downtime."
"It is a mature solution, it has been pretested, there are reference architectures for it, it is easy to use, and it uses the best compute, storage, and networking, which all work together in a proven solution."
"Overall, it's really suited our needs."
"I see the most value in the UCS portion. I love Cisco UCS."
"The product is uniquely valuable for the industry because we've had some experience with a competing solution from another storage vending solution, and it was not nearly as stable."
"We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow."
"Once the initial setup’s completed, it's very steady and continues to run great."
"We want to stay at the front of the cutting edge, and we evaluate and realize that the benefit, the return on investment that Exadata brings for a company of our magnitude and size, is tremendous."
"It is a great investment for the large enterprise."
"We have a complete HA environment with two Exadata machines across two datacenters, and we've been able to use Data Guard to perform switchovers, perform maintenance, and do other tasks with little or no downtime at all."
"This solution meets all of my expectations."
"If you are running Oracle databases, this is the best solution."
"We did some PoC tests with our own data, and we were really getting 10x using Hybrid Columnar Compression, unique to Exadata, so some cost savings there."
"Once installed, Exadata is very stable."
"Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement."
 

Cons

"On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates."
"The procedure for contacting technical support could be simplified."
"As a point solution, it does absolutely what it should. I'm not sure it needs any more. Make it cheaper."
"We have not seen ROI yet."
"The solution has not reduced our data center costs."
"I don't think we've embraced the current solution fully, so we're I think two OSs behind right now."
"There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
"The handling of temp space has room for improvement."
"We used the support from Oracle Exadata to complete the implementation."
"It would be nice to have a single click button to, say, migrate my VMware VM into the Oracle VM, or vice-versa."
"Since the product is an appliance, it is very costly."
"Oracle Exadata compatibility with the analytics could be better and the OBIEE could improve."
"It's always a pain working with the Oracle support team."
"I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"We definitely have noticed that technical support has gone down, unfortunately. The quality of support; it takes a lot longer to get tickets resolved than it did four years ago, when we first bought the Exadata."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"FlexPod has saved data center costs, due to the fact that we reduced our footprint for storage in a big way. We went from three complete racks down to a 2U storage array for more than 300 terabytes of storage."
"Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours)."
"Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective."
"We have reduced our manpower with the solution."
"It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure."
"We have saved time and money for new service deployments."
"We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers."
"We have saved money using FlexPod. We have saved time and money for new service deployments."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."
"The solution’s cost is a little bit more than the traditional databases."
"The solution is expensive."
"Oracle Exadata is costly. Its licensing should also be more versatile. Smaller companies would benefit if Oracle Exadata had lower pricing."
"We pay for an annual license and it is expensive."
"The solution takes a lot of time to clone the environment. I would like to see some improvement in the cloning support or the time it takes on the storage side."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is competitive. There are some features that are outside of the initial purchase license, such as some monitoring packages."
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Marketing Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise86
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata?
I find its pricing reasonable and cost-effective for large organizations, but for smaller organizations, it may not be that useful.
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata?
I believe that there is still room for improvement in Oracle Exadata, as they are putting AI features on those databases, which is making the database more user-friendly. Even you can talk to the d...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Exadata?
I deal most with Oracle database. I have been working with Oracle Database Appliance for more than 25 years, and if you're talking about appliance, it's more than 10 years, but on Oracle database, ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
PayPal, EBS, Organic Food Retailer, Garmin, University of Minnesota, Major Semiconductor Company, Deutsche Bank, Starwood, Ziraat Bank, SK Telecom, and P&G.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure. Updated: March 2026.
889,855 professionals have used our research since 2012.