Oracle Exadata Reviews

The fact that it's an engineered system. It's a database in a box, storage, the networking, the compute engines. All of it's in one nice neat package. My DBAs like administering it. My application owners like its reliability on the back end.

Our ability to scale heavy workloads and our ability to consolidate lighter workloads and reduce our sprawl through the data sector.

Price. Extremely expensive. Maintenance is about industry average. They've got a pretty good upgrade roadmap. But it's been an expensive ride for us, but also a necessary one.

Very stable. No major issues. No downtime that was a result of bugs or some kind of defect in the platform.

It has scaled well.

As a member of IT management with business units breathing down our neck, when there is an issue we always feel the support can be faster but I don't get a lot of complaints. It's good support. Like everything, it could be faster. We'd want to be faster.

It was straightforward for us because we used an integrator partner to put it all in for us, and then our administrators stepped in and took over.

We're constantly looking at other products. We went with Exadata because we needed some muscle on the back end for an ERP implementation. We've been through Exadata first-generation, and right now we're putting in X6s. We've had X2s, X3s, X4s, and we're actually installing X6s right now as we lifecycle through.

It's a great investment for the large enterprise. I think with Exadata in the cloud, that's coming, that we're starting to look at - and they're obviously trying to push here at the conference - I think it'll open itself up to a lot of other customers that probably wouldn't have gone with such an expensive on-premise solution. We're excited about that, too. 

I would definitely recommend it to any colleagues.

They just have a lot of products, and they work well together.

I think it's free. That's one more thing.

I think it's better than the VMware from that perspective. I think it has improved quite a bit in the last 12 months. They're still lagging behind, but I like the new features they're introducing. I think that's why I'm one of the applicants for the product.

My organization is supposed to integrate Oracle products with our line of products too, so it doesn't really improve, but I think it's a synergy between the two companies, to be able to bring in the products from two companies and make it a better solution. I think there's a lot of synergy between the two for that.

Yes. Backup recovery, snapshot technology integrated with the hardware array, DR solutions, more of migrating VMs between different ones.

It would be nice to have a single click button to, say, migrate my VMware VM into the Oracle VM, or vice-versa. That is not available right now, and even the procedures there is really complicated, time-consuming.

Those are a lot of things we talk about with the Oracle VM engineers. They said they're short of resources, they can only prioritize certain things. I'm still hoping that they'll come out soon.

It is. Especially the new version, 3.4.

I have not been playing with the scalability, but I know they can scale pretty high. Especially I know they use it within their own MiniCluster product, and a lot of their appliances. I have no doubt it can scale.

Yes, I have actually. Kind of hit and miss.

It depends, I guess, on the support engineer really. I think I got more misses than hits.

No. It's just my focus of work. I'm supposed to work on Oracle products and their VM solutions, Oracle VM.

I do use the VirtualBox, but that's not enterprise grade, I don't think. Customers in an enterprise environment would not deploy VirtualBox for productions, but they would go with the normal VM for that.

Yes, straightforward.

The documentation is clear. The time to implement is really short. You put the CD in there, and you just kind of follow the prompts and you're done pretty much. I like that aspect of it.

If I were a customer and I had to choose, honestly there's only two other solutions out there, either VMware or Oracle VM. I think Hyper-V is too narrow-focused, so it would be out of my choices.

Again, 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. Oracle databases, or middleware stuff.

I think it's just given me a better customer experience, one vendor to go to for support, one vendor to get patches. I believe that they can offer better integrations in the future. At least that's what I'm hoping for.

They have to look at their existing infrastructure, what they have, and what makes sense.

If they already have a big presence of VMware, it won't make sense to start with Oracle VM products. If they are just starting out, and want to test the waters and see what features, I would definitely recommend Oracle VM first. It does offer a lot of features that VMware does, with the right parts.

Exadata storage cell offloading software is the most valuable feature.

With Exadata database migration we saw a 50x performance gain.

• DevOps and built-in AI libraries to overcome storage.
• Oracle data-file high water mark and self healing, self scale up, scale down.

I have been using Exadata for eight years.

We have not experienced many issues with stability, except with some cell node bugs.

We didn’t have scalability issues.

They have an extremely great Oracle team.

Traditional RAC to optimize all-in-one appliance hardware, database, software, network, storage.

Setup was straightforward.

Oracle should offer free cell node licensing to encourage current RAC clients to switch.

We explored Teradata, Cisco and EMC appliances.

Negotiate with Oracle for licensing and consolidation of licensing.

Storage Base Indexes, Caging and Hybrid Column Compression.

Put all the List of Value tables on Flash Storage for fast Reading in Oracle ERP, Performance Improved.

eAM, Inventory, Financial and Procurement and HR

6 Years

No

No

No

7 out of 10

7 out of 10

IBM AIX P5

Straightforward

In-house

Saved 48 CPU licensing after consolidation on Oracle Exa-data

Little bit high, but it is worth it.

Capacity Planning is Key

Best Solution for Oracle Databases

The most valuable feature is the fact that it's an engineered system. It's a database in a box, storage, the networking, the compute engines. All of it's in one nice, neat package. My DBAs like administering it. My application owners like its reliability on the back end.

The benefits we see are our ability to scale heavy workloads, and our ability to consolidate lighter workloads and reduce our sprawl through the data center.

Price: It’s extremely expensive. Maintenance is about industry average. I think they've got a pretty good upgrade road map. It's been an expensive ride for us but a necessary one.

It is very stable; no major issues; no down time that was a result of bugs or some kind of defect in the platform.

It has scaled well to your needs.

As a member of IT management with business units breathing down our neck when there is an issue or something like that, we always feel the support can be faster but I don't get a lot of complaints. It's good support. Like everything, it could be faster. We'd want it to be faster.

Initial setup was straightforward for us because we used an integrator partner to put it all in for us, and then our administrators step in and take over.

We're constantly looking at other products.

We ultimately chose Exadata because we needed some muscle on the back end for an ERP implementation. We've been through Exadata first generation, and right now we're putting in X6s. We've had X2s, X3s, X4s, and we're actually installing X6s right now as we lifecycle through.

It's a great investment for the large enterprise. I think with Exadata in the cloud that's coming, that we're starting to look at and they are obviously trying to push at conferences, I think it'll open itself up to a lot of other customers that probably wouldn't have gone with such an expensive on-premise solution. We're excited about that, too. I would definitely recommend it to any colleagues.

We're very happy with it.

The performance of Smart Scan, Storage Indexes, etc., and the High Availability features are all valuable to us.

We have a complete HA environment with two Exadata machines across two datacenters. We've able to use Data Guard to perform switchovers, perform maintenance, and do other tasks with little or no downtime at all.

The Lifecycle Management over the whole stack could be improved over what it already provides. The rolling upgrade feature on the database itself should be improved. It needs some Java updates as well as there is too much downtime related to Java issues.

I've been using the platform for five years, and my customer is now buying Exadata X5-2.

We didn't have an issue with deployment.

While we have am MAA environment, it is absolutely robust. We've had no issues with any instability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Oracle Support Services should be improved. The customer has seen more and more discussions within the Oracle Support Groups indicating that support has done more and more finger-pointing, which doesn't help the customer to fix problems.

5/10 - They have a lot to improve upon.

There was no solution previously in place.

The initial setup was complex, but it was well planned by Oracle ACS.

We implemented it between Oracle ACS and an in-house team.

The pricing and licensing is really complex and you need to have a very detailed plan.

The customer looked at a Hitachi solution.

Start with a good POC and then make the decision.

There are several features I've found valuable, including Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, Exadata Smart Scan Technology, and Smart Flash Cache.

We have dramatically improved performance for the batch jobs, after we moved from the traditional Oracle 11G databases to the new Exadata servers.

Performance has improved several-fold and moving (consolidating many small databases from smaller Linux/Unix servers into Exadata cluster) has resulted in lower production support cost and effort for BAU DBAs.

There were some minor problems moving databases to Exadata, but it was more a problem with the internal processes with my current employer.

We've used it since August 2015.

We've not had many issues with deployment, except for the minor issues involving moving databases.

No problems, we have not had any unplanned down-time or performance issues.

We've had no problems with scalability.

Oracle was pretty good in original install and database clusters build, and was pretty helpful in all the requests and questions we posted to them.

I would say technical support is very good. I have extensive working relationships with the Oracle consultants who were deploying the Exadata clusters at Worksafe. We have not had any really major issues with our Exadata clusters so far.

Yes, I have worked as DBAs on traditional Oracle RDBMS versions 9I, 10G and 11G. My previous employer has deployed large DW database into Exadata with great success. Also, Worksafe has decided to move/consolidate many smaller servers/databases into large Exadata clusters. My opinion is that in both cases business users are pretty happy with the database performance and stability on Exadata servers so far.

Initial set-up was a bit complex, but everything was resolved pretty quickly.

Original implementation was done by Oracle, and I would rate the consultant competence as very high.

I was not involved with pricing and licensing.

I was not involved in any before evaluation process.

Exadata is very solid and robust machine, with great performance. Highly recommended for companies (who can afford it).

The extreme performance and data compression that comes straight out of the box.

With Exadata, everything is simply better optimized, and our organization has been leveraging the fact that it can now manage larger volumes of data much more easily than it could previously. For example, we almost never hear our internal or external customers complain about performance issues these days. Performance problems were a recurring problem for us in the past.

X5 supports virtualization, but I think the performance on virtualization is not all that great. I have heard it from a customer, though I admit I haven't tested it out myself.

We have been using this for about three months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We find X5 to be very scalable.

We have always had excellent customer service.

It's excellent.

We were convinced that with Exadata we would be able to consolidate our databases, have a serious performance boost, and leave a smaller footprint on the Data Center.

There were some complexities because a lot of departments were involved, and there were some communication gaps, but generally speaking, it went smoothly.

It was done in-house, but with help from Oracle.

Your TCO and Operational expenses will definitely go down with Exadata.

No, we were pretty much decided on Exadata from the outset.

This product actually does what it promises to - it gives extreme performance on your data set.