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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

"I am happy with the stability. I haven't had any major issues with it in four years. This includes upgrades."
"It simplifies everything; it gives you a single place to go if you need support or if you need to expand."
"It provides ease of automation."
"It has never fallen out from under us when we were trying to do a critical push."
"UCS is more network-driven than it is server-driven, which is what Dell and HP drive on, and once we set up the basic server parts, the rest of it is network-based and it is a mind changer."
"If your company really needs to be up 100% of the time, and you need to do a private data center, I don't know if I could realistically actually recommend another blueprint."
"It is absolutely resilient. It has built-in redundancy and multipathing. If there is an issue with one part, it doesn't fail automatically."
"Implementing this solution has made our staff more efficient because once it is built, it's a matter of provisioning additional VMs."
"You have to pay for the storage and the database in Oracle Exadata; it costs a lot, but it is worth it."
"What I like most about Oracle Exadata is its smart scan feature. I also like that it supports higher capacities and it's high-performing, so my company can use Oracle Exadata for massive databases."
"The Exadata support team is good, they will never let you down."
"It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing."
"The business intelligence is very good."
"It's definitely been stable for us; over a four-year period, we had zero outages."
"This is a really good solution; initially, query issues are expected but once stabilized, an amazing performance is expected."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the storage available."
 

Cons

"There were several different management consoles that we had to deal with: UCS, VMware, and separate ESXi installations. Maybe one interface council where we could manage everything from might be a little easier."
"It would be helpful to have more flexibility for adding other components."
"I would like to see more scalability and possible cost reductions with the all-flash solution."
"​Newer platform reference architectures take a long time to harden and be publicly available.​"
"There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had."
"There are times where we have had issues with technical support."
"Surprise me with something I haven't thought of. Maybe it's out-of-the-box and can configure itself."
"We did run into some hiccups around some different things."
"I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"Price. Extremely expensive."
"The most critical issue was due to a bug with SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol): after connecting Exalogic and Exadata to the same Infiniband fabric and after enabling SDP listeners on Exadata compute nodes, we faced unexpected and random crashes of database hosts."
"The technical support is terrible. When I search on Google, I get more answers than from the Oracle support team."
"It would be nice to have a single click button to, say, migrate my VMware VM into the Oracle VM, or vice-versa."
"It's very specialized hardware. It really meets very critical needs, but it is very expensive."
"The solution could always be more stable and more reliable."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is high and I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"We have saved time with Snapshots, SnapMirrors, and backup and DR capabilities versus other platforms that we have looked at in the past."
"The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect."
"Our licensing costs are about $50,000 per year."
"We can just swap in new equipment or hardware as we need, which has probably saved us several weeks."
"We purchased the solution through CDW. They are a partner and knowledgeable."
"We have reduced our manpower with the solution."
"We have saved 50 percent on new service deployments."
"I give the pricing of the solution a five out of ten."
"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."
"Oracle Exadata is costly. Its licensing should also be more versatile. Smaller companies would benefit if Oracle Exadata had lower pricing."
"Oracle is always costly but it's fine."
"The price of the solution has been expensive to implement."
"There is an annual license to use this solution. The solution is expensive."
"The cost of the solution is high."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
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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.
886,426 professionals have used our research since 2012.