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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

"FlexPods allow us to go through and roll out compute, having a converged infrastructure with the same level of simplicity that you would expect of a hyper-converged."
"We are using the Epic environment on-demand workflow, and that has saved us quite literally thousands of man-hours by helping us refresh, back up, and create new instances."
"I would say that the most valuable feature is the single-vendor support model."
"One of the easiest solutions to implement, maintain, and scale."
"The guides that we use to install FlexPods are always up-to-date. This is really helpful, especially if there is a new product with NetApp moving so far forward and Cisco as well. For them to join together and update a centralized document for the install process, it is really good. It helps us understand if there are features from the first version that we installed while upgrading that we need to implement. Those are in the document. So, we find that document useful and helpful when moving forward."
"Our performance increase has been about 15 percent from what we previously used."
"The product is very stable and it does what it needs to do."
"FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important; before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp, and it's better when vendors can partner and look for a solution together."
"We also looked at Teradata, but Exadata is perfect."
"This makes the queries and processing much faster than before; reports can run within minutes rather than hours."
"Exadata accelerates the performance to whole applications in the environment at least by 2-3x times than the old hardware."
"Exadata is very solid and robust machine, with great performance."
"If I wanted to choose between the two, if I'm not already a VMware customer, I would definitely go Oracle VM, especially when I run Oracle products already."
"Exadata with the In-Memory option is several levels about SAP HANA."
"It has a tremendous increase in performance; it's like night and day."
"If you are looking for a data warehouse machine with large storage capacity, high performance, and manageability, Exadata is the best suite."
 

Cons

"The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects."
"One touch upgrades would be nice."
"The FAS in it, with all its flexibility and scalability, is much more complex and could be simplified."
"I guess the training availability and infinite scalability could be better, and it’s getting there."
"Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that."
"It takes a very sophisticated group of people to run and maintain NetApp and Cisco."
"A progress bar would probably solve all that because they'd like to know, how much more time do we have when we're doing this SnapMirror."
"My one little pet peeve with all of them is that it's still multiple interfaces."
"I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"The handling of temp space has room for improvement."
"It's too costly."
"We did not see the volume of compression claimed by Oracle (10x-50x) on a table that had completely unique data."
"I believe Oracle must improve its procedure to support the clients. The customer Ready Service must provide more use cases and benchmarks of their infrastructure to support client design decisions. Oracle must audit their partners regularly to guarantee they provide quality service even after been passed on partnership examination."
"Customer Service: Platinum support services supplied with the Exadata is worthless."
"It's always a pain working with the Oracle support team."
"However, the people are not always knowledgeable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"Anytime that you are buying any storage make sure you understand storage. Do not just buy storage based on what somebody sells you in terms of IO or throughput."
"Our licensing costs are about $50,000 per year."
"The investment has been great. We put our money into it and it has given us something that we have been able to rely on for years."
"It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure."
"The main return on investment would be that instead of having to refresh all of our desktop hardware we have been able to go reimage existing machines and use those as thin clients, then also purchase new thin clients rather than buying actual hardware. It also reduces the overhead of having our technicians deploy those systems and maintain them."
"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."
"The total cost of ownership with this solution is good."
"The price is very high."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"There is an annual license to use this solution. The solution is expensive."
"The cost of the solution is high."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is competitive. There are some features that are outside of the initial purchase license, such as some monitoring packages."
"The solution is expensive."
"Oracle Exadata is costly. Its licensing should also be more versatile. Smaller companies would benefit if Oracle Exadata had lower pricing."
"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."
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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
26%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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
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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.
891,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.