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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

"As long as it's within your budget, it's a great one-shot deal that allows you to really have an integrated platform that you can just build off of."
"The most valuable feature is the one call number for support and the fact that all the documentation comes with it. They have all of the preprepared plans for the deployment model and we can just choose which one we want for VMware, etc. The hardware is all listed. We buy that and away we go. It's called validated design."
"The tool's most valuable features are the flexibility and ability to adapt to redundancy."
"The most valuable features are the CVDs and the support behind it from both companies."
"The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well."
"Performance-wise, it is actually doing quite well. The end users are very happy with it."
"This is the best hyperconverged infrastructure."
"UCS Profiles enable recovering a physical server in less than 15 minutes."
"Oracle is known to be the number one in their industry; the help and support, the features they are giving the clients comparing to other databases, the new technology, the provide a good solution."
"One of the customers we work with had mostly thousands of batch jobs, which used to take 30 to 40 hours; with Exadata and re-architecting some of those solutions on Exadata, it turned out to be running in one hour or less than one hour, and in the end, the company realized the return on the investment they have made into Exadata."
"The best features are its robustness, stability, and performance."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the smart scan. We have large TB sessions of approximately 100 per second for each of our three instances. The smart scan allows us the obtain data in time in the enterprise manager."
"The ease of setup is an eight out of ten."
"Backup/Restore performance: Fast backups, fast restores (especially useful for creating clone environments)."
"We have had no issues with stability."
"The biggest benefit for organization is the performance."
 

Cons

"The FlexPod service and support could be improved."
"We would like more security features."
"Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution."
"We are wondering how all this data will be synchronized and if we can get a common solution and common input."
"Make it easier to refresh hardware. We got to the point where we couldn't fix vulnerabilities without refreshing the hardware, then that became a little too expensive for us to do."
"In the next generation, I'd just like to see bigger, faster, and better."
"They could improve their technical support team. They need to have a specific phone number for you to call in for the FlexPod solution."
"A couple things could be improved, for example, the interconnect switching. They need to be more flexible."
"Try to diminish the logging service."
"It is difficult to evaluate return-on-investment because of the way billing is handled for the product."
"The improvement could be made on the hardware level as the habit in the industry is to go better and faster and larger with every iteration."
"The scalability can be improved as it is not a parallel execution."
"It would be nice to have a single click button to, say, migrate my VMware VM into the Oracle VM, or vice-versa."
"I would like to add some features to run applications or microservices-based applications on Exadata."
"It is difficult to evaluate return-on-investment because of the way billing is handled for the product. This should be improved by oracle."
"Setting up Exadata is complex. You need an Oracle vendor or someone who is Oracle-certified to set it up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive. My company is small. When you look at the price point, this is a big thing for us to invest in."
"Cost is the primary factor behind why I would not give this product a perfect rating."
"We purchased FlexPod though Datalink."
"The scalability is very expensive."
"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"We have seen our data center rack space collapse about 90 percent. We have a data center which only has two racks now out of the 20 that were there previously."
"We pay approximately $1,400 USD in total for between five-thousand and ten-thousand ports."
"Licensing can be interesting with the new version because of the Intersight integration. I don't know what that looks like yet. I have seen some of the different licensing models, but with the new purchasing, all customers are going to have to buy some sort of Intersight licensing with the Blades or FlexPod. I am curious to see how that option shakes out. Previous to the UCS X-Series, the licensing was the same."
"Oracle Exadata is costly. Its licensing should also be more versatile. Smaller companies would benefit if Oracle Exadata had lower pricing."
"Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution."
"Oracle is always costly but it's fine."
"The solution is expensive."
"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 cost of the solution is high."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."
"The price of the solution has been expensive to implement."
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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.
889,855 professionals have used our research since 2012.