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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 (1st)
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 8.4% compared to last year.
Oracle Exadata, on the other hand, focuses on Data Warehouse, holds 9.9% mindshare, down 17.0% since last year.
Converged Infrastructure Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
FlexPod XCS12.6%
HPE ConvergedSystem12.3%
Dell VxBlock System10.2%
Other64.9%
Converged Infrastructure
Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Oracle Exadata9.9%
Snowflake10.4%
Teradata9.5%
Other70.2%
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

"FlexPod provides very small footprint. We can have it in our offices without bothering with extra cooling, as it is a small unit."
"It's flexible. You can scale up or out. Our environment has never needed it, but the option has always been there."
"DR has been tremendously easier."
"The agility is probably the most valuable feature for us. It's very easy to send out resources."
"FlexPod's native integration with hyperscalers is one of the reasons we chose to look at it and NetApp. That is one of the key components of our infrastructure. That native integration is very important."
"The tool's most valuable features are the flexibility and ability to adapt to redundancy."
"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."
"The ability to create vDisks on NFS exports is an added advantage. This is very helpful when we reach RDM limit."
"We can use virtualization on Exadata."
"The most valuable feature is the time to solution."
"Parallelism is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"Oracle is easy to use for peripheral things, such as the data vault and the data firewall, data sync, and partitions. These are the features that give an edge to other databases."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the integration with other solutions, such as SAN storage and shared VLAN network."
"It is a highly relevant option with extreme performance."
"The new Exadata x9m has an even higher speed of 100GBps connectivity."
 

Cons

"Support could be more integrated. For example, you might call NetApp, and they'll determine that VMware is the issue. It would be helpful if they could automatically engage VMware and bring them onto the same call to transfer ticket information and work together."
"We have had a bit of struggle on the support side. From a customer perspective, it has been up to us to make sure that we get both NetApp and Cisco involved when we have had an issue."
"Hyper-V is not as well supported by NetApp and Cisco as VMware is, which is something that should be improved."
"FlexPod will do very well on the average app, but there's room for improvement in performance and the data center side."
"I would like them to integrate the NVIDIA GRID into the system, so we could easily deploy certain solutions with the FlexPod."
"I would like them to scale more to rack unit servers instead of blade servers."
"I would like to see better operations, a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire design across VMware, Cisco, etc. I would also like the upgrade process to be a little smoother."
"FlexPod should focus more on automation. Integrating an automation tool with FlexPod would enable customers to leverage automation capabilities."
"We had issues with system restoration."
"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."
"Oracle Exadata could improve the platform performance tuning should be easier, automated, and user-friendly."
"It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions."
"Certification should also be improved. Today, Oracle doesn't certify applications with engineered systems."
"We have experienced some issues with processing unstructured data on Exadata. This is an important requirement for our AIML based use case. Reactive analytics data can not be prepared easily in Oracle Exadata."
"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."
"We used the support from Oracle Exadata to complete the implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have saved 50 percent on new service deployments."
"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"I find the licensing and pricing structure to be favorable."
"We would like everything in one piece of hardware. This way we can just sell the product like a silo by putting everything in a stack together."
"We have a lease for approximately $10,000 USD per month."
"The total cost of ownership with this solution is good."
"We purchased FlexPod though Datalink."
"Pricing and licensing is very affordable from a FlexPod perspective."
"I think it's free."
"The solution’s cost is a little bit more than the traditional databases."
"The cost of the solution is high."
"We pay for an annual license and it is expensive."
"Our customers are always looking to reduce the license's cost."
"Oracle is always costly but it's fine."
"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."
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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
Manufacturing Company
20%
Performing Arts
10%
Educational Organization
9%
Transportation Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
7%
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

What do you like most about FlexPod?
The system is designed for easy scaling. Because we define everything clearly. So when we plug the system in, we apply the profile, and it scales easily.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FlexPod?
The pricing is not cheaper, but stability is more important for us now. We focus on business gains, not static numbers. Following XCS rules ensures a stable environment, which is crucial. For me, C...
What needs improvement with FlexPod?
FlexPod should focus more on automation. Integrating an automation tool with FlexPod would enable customers to leverage automation capabilities. More automation would be helpful. Currently, we cont...
What do you like most about Oracle Exadata?
It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing.
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...
 

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 NetApp, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure. Updated: January 2026.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.