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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 12.6%, up 8.8% compared to last year.
Oracle Exadata, on the other hand, focuses on Data Warehouse, holds 8.1% mindshare, down 16.7% since last year.
Converged Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
FlexPod XCS12.6%
HPE ConvergedSystem11.5%
Dell VxBlock System8.7%
Other67.2%
Converged Infrastructure
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Exadata8.1%
Snowflake10.2%
Teradata9.0%
Other72.7%
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

"With the FlexPod solution we've been able to employ VDI, the first in the Marine Corps."
"We have also seen an improvement in our application performance, as our VM and database environments are able to go as fast as we need them to now."
"One of the most valuable aspects is its integrated convergence infrastructure, particularly the LAN and SAN cloud features that offer a unified fabric."
"Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective."
"Due to the way the equipment is all together, with its resiliency, typically we have zero downtime."
"We went from having somewhere around three to five outages every year to us not having had any outages in the past four or five years."
"The Cisco Validated Designs are the most valuable feature along with the Industry-leading technology, put together; and the fact that it just works."
"It's a kind of one-stop shop as far as support goes."
"Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report, now we can do it within five hours, so there is a lot of improvement."
"The most valuable feature is supposed to be speed."
"With SuperCluster and Exadata, all of the servers and storage are integrated within the same rack, reducing configuration and setup time, increasing performance, and making maintenance and patching easy."
"If you are looking for a data warehouse machine with large storage capacity, high performance, and manageability, Exadata is the best suite."
"This is a really good solution; initially, query issues are expected but once stabilized, an amazing performance is expected."
"The new Exadata x9m has an even higher speed of 100GBps connectivity."
"Oracle Exadata Tech Support has been great."
"Parallelism is the most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"We dislike going online with the robot stuff. Many times, it has delayed our reaching out to a real support engineer."
"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."
"They should cram more space in there and find a way to compress things more; dedupe better."
"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."
"On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates."
"A couple things could be improved, for example, the interconnect switching. They need to be more flexible."
"Our environment does not always require this solution, so we are not reaping the optimal ROI."
"Supporting it is a little more challenging only because of the familiarity with the GUIs."
"I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"The management monitoring tools are quite important and an area that needs some improvement."
"We definitely have noticed that technical support has gone down, unfortunately. The quality of support; it takes a lot longer to get tickets resolved than it did four years ago, when we first bought the Exadata."
"I would like to see better application performance."
"Price. Extremely expensive."
"One improvement would be the limitation on the storage."
"Training is one of the biggest issues that we are having."
"Initial setup is complex. You need Oracle technical support to do your initial setup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"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."
"The scalability is very expensive."
"Because the solution is now stable, we are saving about $100 million USD a year."
"Overall, the solution works pretty well. The biggest complaint I have from customers is the cost."
"We have seen a five to ten percent savings on new service deployments."
"We have saved time, money, space, and power consumption on new service deployments. We have a data center in Toronto which had ten racks on one of the new servers. This was all reduced to two racks with six chassis, which is amazing."
"The scalability is very good. I wish it was a more cost-effective, but you get what you pay for."
"The majority of our customers are in government or big enterprises, and the projects that we sell come out to several million USD. With this amount of money on the table, it's always better to have an experienced team of consultants, who know Exadata very well, handle the implementation."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"The licensing can be a bit expensive because you need to have certain tools enabled that require them."
"The cost of the product could be improved."
"The price of the solution has been expensive to implement."
"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."
"It is an expensive product and you pay more for certain performance enhancements."
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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
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.
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