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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

"Things got a lot faster. We can pull and test in DEV systems much more rapidly and are clearing up a lot of DBA time. In the past, every time we tested it, we needed to be refreshed. In the past, it would take a day of our DBA's time, and now it's just point, click, and ten minutes later it's done."
"Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased."
"I think the validated design and architectures, and being able to call one of the parties for support and they can fix your problem is great."
"Software flexibility. Everything is fully configurable. The reliability results from the design. Elements are well projected (disks, blade, network, etc.). No single point of failure is identifiable."
"We went from having somewhere around three to five outages every year to us not having had any outages in the past four or five years."
"For people comparing NetApp vs Pure, or NetApp vs EMC, I would tell them to seriously look at NetApp because of the scalability and because of the ease of use."
"Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place."
"It’s basically very scalable and reliable."
"This solution meets all of my expectations."
"It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing."
"The performance of the data is the most important part."
"Complete management occurs from one single address instead of different servers."
"If I wanted to choose between the two, if I'm not already a VMware customer, I would definitely go Oracle VM, especially when I run Oracle products already."
"It's definitely been stable for us; over a four-year period, we had zero outages."
"The biggest advantage to our implementation of Exadata is that because it's an Oracle-engineered system, our database administrations don't have to worry about performance tuning."
"After moving to Oracle Exadata, we were able to add more users, and queries get executed very quickly for data warehousing, around one quarter to half the time when compared to our previous solution under normal conditions."
 

Cons

"The initial setup was complex. UCS is not the easiest thing to configure from the ground up. The networking pieces can get confusing, especially when you are talking about virtual segmentation. It is not as easy as other things now on the market, such as hyperconverged."
"However, for a lot of our customers, the complexity of FlexPod can be a little overwhelming."
"I would like to see if it could come down in price a little bit."
"We would like more security features."
"When we are positioning against a cheaper solution it's really difficult to sell NetApp to our small customers, so it's really difficult to position."
"Technical support is not fantastic."
"I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this."
"On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates."
"The problem with the Oracle Exadata is that it is a dead-end of technology."
"We only had a few stability issues with unexpected reboots."
"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."
"Currently, it is not scalable; we carried out a benchmark against another company's product, where Oracle took about 14 hours and that company's product took only thirty minutes."
"The Oracle support team needs to understand the product better than the customers do."
"Adaptability is a little bit challenging for the customer because of the licensing and the pricing."
"Oracle Exadata is not a cheap solution. Pricing is a problem for Oracle, and every client, not just my company, would like the vendor to improve on the price, or lower the price."
"The integration with third-party applications regarding access management security could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It created lower total cost of ownership. Previously, we had disparate storage and servers, and there were bits of kits everywhere. Now, we have two data centers with almost identical setups in both."
"The NetApp portion was a $5 million investment five years ago. That has served the customer well over five and a half years."
"It is cost-effective."
"We can just swap in new equipment or hardware as we need, which has probably saved us several weeks."
"Storage is very expensive. To buy MIC cards and additional storage either on-prem or in the cloud, the IT department does not have money for it, so you need a more niche product or a more flexible way to store your data. That is the benefit that you get from this product."
"Make sure you are buying for performance, not just capacity."
"I find the licensing and pricing structure to be favorable."
"As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts."
"In the sizing phase, you can also decide whether to license all cores, or reduce the number cores using capacity-on-demand features of Exadata, as well. This has a direct impact on licensing."
"I'm giving Oracle Exadata five out of ten in terms of pricing. Its price could be lower."
"Our customers are always looking to reduce the license's cost."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"It is quite expensive."
"You have to pay for the storage and the database in Oracle Exadata. It cost a lot, but it is worth it. It would be a benefit if we could reduce the price for the number of CPUs and extend the memory."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is competitive. There are some features that are outside of the initial purchase license, such as some monitoring packages."
"It is an expensive product and you pay more for certain performance enhancements."
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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%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

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.
886,719 professionals have used our research since 2012.