Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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

"We have significantly less latency now with our imagery."
"I live by the Validated Designs. I do exactly what those designs say and I haven't had a problem as a result. For example, they used to do the FCoE. They figured out there was a problem and they went over to the NFS. I moved over and I agreed with them. It worked better."
"It is an easy, straightforward system to set up and maintain."
"The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately."
"The most valuable feature of FlexPod is that it allows you to get the old compute storage and the network switch or the fabric of the network in one box. You can use pods to have a tiny cloud in the box, which is one of its best features."
"The vendor delivers a fully-configured prebuilt system with a certain baseline on it."
"The best thing about this solution is the tight integration with VMware, Cisco, and NetApp from both a hardware and software perspective."
"The ease of set up is probably the most valuable feature for us."
"The most valuable feature is storage offloading."
"On-premises Exadata is just as stable as the cloud version. It's a very stable platform."
"A very stable solution, which we have hardly any problems with."
"It offers a significant advantage for accommodating a large number of users."
"The tool's performance is good."
"What I found most valuable in Oracle Exadata is its newer technology that gives better performance. It has more recent hardware and significant changes in the architecture, so it's better than older solutions."
"We like the tool’s features like Smart Scan, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and the TFA."
"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."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see better integrations with some of the third-party tools, like Terraform. That would be good. We use Ansible to deploy and that's good, but it's slower than it needs to be."
"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."
"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. I have dashboards so I can see the health of the system when I'm in the office, but when I'm not in the office I can't."
"We would like something like a FlexPod Express; we want a smaller version for small offices."
"The upgrades should be improved. We would like to have the ability to do unified upgrades of the whole infrastructure from beginning to end."
"It would be great to see some form of interoperability between the FAS units and the E-Series, specifically for replication, even if it is just one more replication from a FAS to an E-Series. That would be amazing."
"The procedure for contacting technical support could be simplified."
"Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades."
"The scalability can be improved as it is not a parallel execution."
"Patching must be simplified."
"Oracle Exadata could improve the platform performance tuning should be easier, automated, and user-friendly."
"The initial setup process is very difficult and extremely complex."
"A room for improvement in Oracle Exadata is that it's not very easy to use in a microservices environment. It's not easy to split databases, and if this was easier to do in Oracle Exadata, it would make the solution better. What I'd like to see in the next release of Oracle Exadata is for it to become more modular, so you can use it in a context where the data layer is spread between many independent services."
"I would like to add some features to run applications or microservices-based applications on Exadata."
"There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements."
"The performance could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has saved our customers' organization in terms of CapEx. E.g., with the cloud availability, it's turned into sort of a hybrid CapEx/OpEx model."
"The cost is a little high."
"We immediately saw a return on investment due to the fact that replacing our legacy storage arrays with the new AFFs reduced the footprint and maintenance costs. Overall, we saw an almost immediate ROI."
"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."
"We have absolutely seen ROI. We have saved between two to four million dollars on travel alone over the past 24 months."
"FlexPod has saved data center costs, due to the fact that we reduced our footprint for storage in a big way. We went from three complete racks down to a 2U storage array for more than 300 terabytes of storage."
"The total cost of ownership with this solution is good."
"We have saved money using FlexPod. We have saved time and money for new service deployments."
"The solution’s cost is a little bit more than the traditional databases."
"The licensing can be a bit expensive because you need to have certain tools enabled that require them."
"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."
"It is quite expensive."
"Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution."
"It is an expensive product and you pay more for certain performance enhancements."
"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."
"I'm giving Oracle Exadata five out of ten in terms of pricing. Its price could be lower."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Converged Infrastructure solutions are best for your needs.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
27%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.