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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 12.3%, up 8.6% compared to last year.
Oracle Exadata, on the other hand, focuses on Data Warehouse, holds 8.7% mindshare, down 17.1% since last year.
Converged Infrastructure Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
FlexPod XCS12.3%
HPE ConvergedSystem11.7%
Dell VxBlock System9.4%
Other66.6%
Converged Infrastructure
Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Oracle Exadata8.7%
Snowflake10.1%
Teradata9.4%
Other71.80000000000001%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy IT Manager at MBBank
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

"It is easy to deploy, works well, the reps are good, and the support is great."
"Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance."
"The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it."
"The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well."
"From the Cisco side, the most valuable features of this solution are the data center density, the deployment, and the management of the servers and the networking."
"The validated design is really important for us because it gives us a model on which to base our architecture and continued support for all firmware upgrades. It also provides consistency throughout the environment."
"The product is robust, stable, and has flexibility."
"It makes us more lateral and faster to production."
"Regarding features, there are so many that we can offer to customers. When we sell Exadata Cloud, there are many options to choose from, especially when it comes to enterprise database options. In my experience, the main features that are appreciated are various ones like GPS and the assortment of security options."
"It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing."
"The performance of the data is the most important part."
"The most valuable feature is that you have the same familiar environment of an Oracle database but with the additional performance you get from this architecture."
"It has improved the performance, now we run with more performance cores with less CPU to attend all the database demands. Reducing Time to Market, increase our ability to face the competition with speed and low cost."
"Parallelism is the most valuable feature."
"A very stable solution, which we have hardly any problems with."
"The most valuable feature is storage offloading."
 

Cons

"Updates are not frequent enough."
"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."
"Our environment does not always require this solution, so we are not reaping the optimal ROI."
"I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly."
"The tool is obsolete and we are migrating to HPE. It should improve the pricing."
"I would like to see synchronous replication and easier automation in the next release."
"Automatic tiering would be good to have."
"We would like one-click upgrades."
"Oracle Exadata could improve the monitoring system in the enterprise manager, it could be more user-friendly. In most Oracle tools there is a lot of functionality, and sometimes you need to do five or six clicks to find metrics, and sometimes it's a waste of time."
"It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions."
"We have experienced some issues with processing unstructured data on Exadata. This is an important requirement for our AIML based use case. Reactive analytics data can not be prepared easily in Oracle Exadata."
"The improvement could be made on the hardware level as the habit in the industry is to go better and faster and larger with every iteration."
"We need a monitoring tool which can in one place, where we can manage, monitor the entire Exadata components."
"Certification should also be improved. Today, Oracle doesn't certify applications with engineered systems."
"I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"The handling of temp space has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We fear high availability so we can't buy from different providers."
"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating."
"It is cheaper than other products. For example, Dell EMC VxBlock is more expensive."
"We purchased from CDW•G. They are great partners on the government side."
"The investment has been great. We put our money into it and it has given us something that we have been able to rely on for years."
"Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road."
"Everything is purchased, so we do not do any leasing with this product."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is competitive. There are some features that are outside of the initial purchase license, such as some monitoring packages."
"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."
"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."
"I did note that Oracle does tend to internally oversize things especially if they want to fill up a budget, and hence third-party oversight is essential."
"The Initial investment price could use improvement"
"I give the pricing of the solution a five out of ten."
"We pay for an annual license and it is expensive."
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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
Marketing Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Performing Arts
7%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Marketing Services Firm
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

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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: February 2026.
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