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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

"Customer Service: NetApp support is great."
"We have absolutely seen ROI, as we have saved between two to four million dollars on travel alone over the past 24 months."
"Overall, as an entire package, it has everything that we need and support is very helpful when needed."
"The most valuable features are the Fabric Interconnect Manager and the UCS Manager."
"FlexPod simplifies infrastructure from edge to core to cloud, and that is one of the main reasons we chose FlexPod."
"It's an all-in-one validated design; we don't have to worry about making sure that thing A supports thing B, as it's all top-down, integrated, and validated, which means for us, it's going to just work."
"The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it."
"The product is easy to deploy and use."
"The storage capacity and the performance of Oracle Exadata are good, and when comparing the performance to other technologies it is very good, and I am satisfied with the management of the solution."
"It is a great investment for the large enterprise."
"It offers a significant advantage for accommodating a large number of users."
"This is a really good solution; initially, query issues are expected but once stabilized, an amazing performance is expected."
"If somebody wants 5 or 6 9s worth of availability, a very good place for them to be is with one of Oracles engineered system solutions."
"I am satisfied with its functionalities and performance."
"What I like best about Oracle Exadata is its good performance; it's also a very fast solution."
"The Exadata support team is good, they will never let you down."
 

Cons

"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"NetApp is a bit more complicated to set up than everything else."
"One of the things that I've wanted would be availability of a health status, similar to Active IQ from my converged platform, on an app."
"The ability to manage the templates across sites. We would like to easily take out the configuration of one FlexPod and copy it over, just making minor changes. There is a way to do it, but it's clumsy."
"It's always the same: upgrade and expandability into the future; maybe a little more forethought on that versus having to have outages when you're going over to the next feature."
"Perhaps the automation interface could be improved."
"Areas for improvement would be the support for the engineering team, who seem to have no clue when you open a case, the communication with and recognition of resellers, and the documentation, with could be more detailed."
"We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices."
"The Oracle support team needs to understand the product better than the customers do."
"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."
"However, the people are not always knowledgeable."
"It's too costly."
"Sometimes pricing can be a bit of an issue, especially if customers don't know exactly what they're getting."
"We can't even run our application right now because we ran into a patch problem."
"Performance is what we always tend to work on and it could still be improved."
"There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective."
"I find the licensing and pricing structure to be favorable."
"It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure."
"Everything is purchased, so we do not do any leasing with this product."
"Pricing is always tough. We need to get to a point where the customer's happy. Then, as partners, we are also happy."
"As a startup, for the amount of budget we have and the amount we spend, we are getting what we expected."
"Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase."
"The scalability is very good. I wish it was a more cost-effective, but you get what you pay for."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"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."
"It is quite expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times."
"There is an annual license to use this solution. The solution is expensive."
"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."
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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.
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