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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

"Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective."
"Ease of cabling is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"It runs our VMs. Our SQL databases are all on VMs, so everything is virtualized."
"FlexPod is easy to setup, maintain and has great stability."
"FlexPod impacted us by making things easier to deploy; the solution is a private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environment, which is very important to us because we are doing a lot of hybrid cloud."
"It ships in a rack, so it is very easy to deploy."
"This is a stable solution with good technical support."
"FlexPod gives us the opportunity to deploy a product which is fully built and racked with minimal touch installation when it arrives onsite, so we can do all the configuration remotely."
"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, increasing our ability to face the competition with speed and low cost."
"I am satisfied with its functionalities and performance."
"Excellent performance gains especially for large data warehouse types of applications."
"It's about consolidation of my infrastructure, scalability, high performance, and availability."
"Overall, Exadata justifies the total cost of ownership (TCO) by balancing the capital and operational expenses - thereby achieving a higher ROI."
"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."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"You have to pay for the storage and the database in Oracle Exadata; it costs a lot, but it is worth it."
 

Cons

"Automatic tiering would be good to have."
"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."
"I would like more support for different platforms, possibly different database platforms."
"Perhaps having a unified interface for managing the entire company could lead to improved efficiency and performance."
"One feature we would like to see is SSD with the Cisco UCS Mini already available."
"The solution has not reduced our data center costs."
"The graphical interface could be made easier to use and more intuitive."
"FlexPod has not decreased the unplanned downtime incidents in our company. There was a problem with the back-end configuration and we had a downtime of three hours."
"If you're running a commercial off the shelf application against these engineered system, sometimes it's a little more complex to work with a third party vendor, to speed things up."
"It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions."
"Oracle Exadata compatibility with the analytics could be better and the OBIEE could improve. Oracle BI to Exadata needs to be improved. Even if the full analytics practice for Oracle should be improved and when compared with other solutions it is weak."
"We have experienced some performance-related challenges."
"In the current version we're using, we had lots of storage issues, disk failures, etc. We think in the future, we'd like to see that reduced."
"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."
"X5 supports virtualization, but I think the performance on virtualization is not all that great."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Make sure that you engage as much with whom you are buying from as a partnership, not just as a purchase."
"Pricing is always tough. We need to get to a point where the customer's happy. Then, as partners, we are also happy."
"We have a lease for approximately $10,000 USD per month."
"We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past."
"Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours)."
"The NetApp portion was a $5 million investment five years ago. That has served the customer well over five and a half years."
"The product is kind of expensive even from an entry-level standpoint. I would say FlexPod would be the way to go if you are a larger business or one with large data volume."
"Because the solution is now stable, we are saving about $100 million USD a year."
"The solution’s cost is a little bit more than the traditional databases."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"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."
"We pay for an annual license and it is expensive."
"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. My company paid for several years' worth of Oracle Exadata licenses. You need to pay for the technical support and other features separately, on different contracts. In terms of affordability, my rating for Oracle Exadata is two out of five."
"The price of the solution has been expensive to implement."
"Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution."
"I'm giving Oracle Exadata five out of ten in terms of pricing. Its price could be lower."
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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.
886,932 professionals have used our research since 2012.