Oracle Exadata Reviews

Exadata has been very great for us in terms of database consolidation. We have been using Exadata because we have been upgrading our technology every single year. In the past, we were using a Sun server and managing that as an active-passive cluster.

There have been initiatives to convert the databases to Oracle RAC; so when Exadata came out, they didn't really have to do much of anything. The grid infrastructure and everything came built in with all the best practices.

One of the advantages we found was that we didn't really need to be the first ones to be hit by a bug. If any of our customers comes across a bug, we already had a patch ready for it.

We have the platinum service for the database. That comes in handy in terms of high availability.

With all of this, the storage and the compute nodes were built together so they have more knowledge of Oracle-related queries: whether it is a redo or an IO; or it's coming from an undo space or from a DML. All these kinds of things come in really handy for us in terms of making our database perform really well.

These are some of the advantages I think we got out of Exadata.

The high availability of the database improved a lot. Our customers who are using it seem to be very happy with the response times. We also have a hot standby in case you need to migrate or do an upgrade. Overall, the company itself was very happy after migrating to Exadata.

The mix and match of hardware is always a problem. If you start with a product here and you want to migrate it two years later, you don't get the same version of the hardware. It's always different when you mix and match hardware. For example, if one compute node is X3-2, another two compute nodes are X5-2, and the storage node is different, I think it's going to get complicated. I don't know how to resolve it.

It would be nice if there was a way that you could swap everything over to upgrade all the hardware to one piece where it matches everything, and have an automatic hardware upgrade available. This way, you could keep everything on the same hardware solution. I don't know if that is possible.

Their support needs improvement. Also, the model in which they operate with a complex architecture in terms of upgrading the hardware pieces and expansion of RACs. Even the storage is licensed, which is a bigger question mark.

Any mission can go wrong. Exadata is no exception to this. Of course, we had software bugs; it's Oracle. You can expect a lot of back and forth with the new versions of it. We had lots of stability issues in the beginning. One of the major issues was the Write Back Flash Cache. By default, the storage nodes come with write-through. That's not very good for your OLE DB because it's not going to hit your flash. It's going to directly hit your hard disk. That's not going to give you good performance. The implementation team did not do a good job knowing that it's an OLE DB. They did not enable the Write Back Flash Cache.

The first few databases that we migrated went really well; but when we migrated more databases, it started failing. We had a big problem. We had to enable the Write Back Flash Cache to restabilize it.

Of course, the storage nodes have multiple bugs in them. Constantly upgrading it is a pain because while we do have high availability, not all the patches are done in a rolling fashion. Some of them force you to do non-rolling patches, specifically the OJVM patches.

Those are some of the pain points that I can see with Exadata.

So far, we don't have a big problem with scaling because we are happy with two node clusters. When we really need to expand, then we will need to cross that bridge when we come to it.

It's always a pain working with the Oracle support team. I say this because not all tickets get resolved immediately. It can take many days. Sometimes it takes a week. This can also include the weekend. During the weekend, the support team is thin. I need to follow up many times and call their managers. We have to scream at them to get back to us.

It's always a little bit difficult dealing with Oracle support compared to other vendors. They are a bigger organization. It does become a little complicated with such a big organization. With other vendors, you can call and resolve things properly and easily. I think there are a lot of process-oriented delays when it comes to Oracle. That’s built in as part of dealing with a bigger organization.

Because the ticket is not handled by a single engineer, sometimes the other engineer needs to digest it first. For example, a person in the US could start to help us, and then hand it over to someone in the UK. When that persons gets on board, he takes some time to digest the previous engineer’s explanation, recommendations, and diagnosis of the problem. If it continues to be handed over, and if it goes on for days, each engineer needs to go through the entire history of the ticket. That is a pain.

In such cases, it is always better to stick with a particular engineer and to a certain time zone. This means that the solution will be delayed. It depends on how soon you want to get it resolved. You might want your account manager to put pressure on the support team.

I am hoping for smoother operations and coordination in the future.

The initial setup depends on the technical team. The ACS team at Oracle can help, but it depends on which engineer you get on board. If the engineer is new on the team, doesn’t completely understand it, and is simply following instructions according to a script, there is every possibility that it could go wrong, if we don’t have a core team at our end verifying each step.

It is very important that you be prepared, and that you know every single change that goes into it end-to-end, including the monitoring and enabling the ASR service if you are going to use the platinum service.

A combination of pure flash storage and T4-4 servers are also extremely good in terms of latency times. It matches your TPS (transactions per second). Oracle had a little bit of an edge in terms of the best practices. Also, it's easier to debug and give us a solution because they can replicate the same issue in their environment. These are some of the slight advantages that Oracle Exadata has in terms of providing a solution more efficiently and quickly.

We always believed that Oracle is a leader in improving technology. We always believe in their solutions. Oracle Exadata is a great product without a doubt. Our gut now says why not go like we wanted and migrate to Oracle RAC. We didn’t want to spend time to put everything together, the network, the storage, and so on. Why reinvent the wheel when every best practice is already there? The "gotcha" is that if you increase the number of cores, you must be prepared to pay for the license.

Those are things that we weren't initially aware of, but then it all came handy to us when we need to go with engineered systems. That's why our upgrade part on our infrastructure upgrade and Oracle engineered system are on the same plane, so we just used it.

Exadata is not for everybody. Initially, it was designed for data warehousing. It's not for OLTP data. They improved it to OLTP, and then you could consolidate and mix and match. For all the patches, be aware whether you really want to go with it and expand it. Use all due diligence in checking whether this engineered system is the right solution for you . You need to work with it and test it yourself to make sure that it is for you. There might be a better product for you other than Exadata.

If you do want to go with Exadata, you should consult with someone outside of Oracle to help you and verify whether this is a good solution for you. Do not decide based on marketing material or gimmicks.

Fast performance and tons of storage that we can have to put a lot of databases under the Exadata Server are the most valuable features in this product.

For us, speed is the most important factor. For our SLAs, we need to maintain the performance. Thus, performance is one of the main criteria for our applications and that plays a major role.

Performance is what we always tend to work on and it could still be improved. For example, if we get Echo Calls then the performance also shoots up.

We have recently moved over to Exadata. Currently, we have not experienced any stability issues

We are still moving. So far it is satisfactory, although we are not getting our work locked under.

We did look at other products but Oracle has its way of marketing. We had IBM as the other competitor, but I don't know whether they have any product equal to Exadata.

Go for it if cost is not a factor.  It's been good; so far we have not experienced any issues.

The place where I've used it are mainly on the data warehouses with larger implementations, and having everything in one enclosure is really a lot nicer. Having the disk, all the memory, and all the networking, makes not just the implementation easier, but as you're running it, a lot simpler to administer. Because we're asking it to handle everything, it's a simple solution to administer and support. It also has plugins that makes it easier to monitor.

Definitely having the ability to have one machine do everything has been the biggest improvement for us organizationally. From the administration side, it helps. If one or two admins can handle it, they don't have to go all over the place to, such as to the storage team, the network team, or anywhere else because they can do a lot of things internally. Definitely, we've seen cost, time, and HR savings with several implementations.

Sometimes pricing can be a bit of an issue, especially if customers don't know exactly what they're getting. Maybe they've gone through the whole process and they didn't get the right size or the right amount. I've worked with several customers who had implementations that were too small and then had to upgrade, as well with others who were overpowered with their implementations.

The deployments have been issue-free.

We haven't really had any stability issues. The experiences we have had were when there have been hardware failures, but a Oracle took care of that pretty quickly. Our customer had databases and memory modules die and everything kept running. With the failures we've seen, it's stayed very consistent on the ones we've done.

If it's done with the right specs in mind, it seems to scale pretty well. We haven't really had any scalability issues.

Exadata is pretty much set up when it ships. Afterwards, you just have to copy data over and it's ready to go. So the setup is fairly easy and straightforward.

Definitely do a POC on it. Work closely with Oracle Professional Services to help you with the right configurations.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for a data warehouse using only a Linux environment.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the integration with other solutions, such as SAN storage and shared VLAN network.

Oracle Exadata could improve by decreasing the price.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately six years.

The Oracle Exadata environment design is very reliable. I have not had any issues with the solution on the cloud or on-premise.

Oracle Exadata is highly scalable. You can increase the network and everything works well.

We have approximately 10 clients using the solution in the finance sector.

The support from Oracle Exadata is good.

The initial setup of Oracle Exadata is done by well-trained engineers. I have to prepare the environment with all the systems, active environments, and IoT networks. After the preparation, the engineers can do the scripting. Once installed from the scripts we can work with it.

The whole implementation process can take between two and three hours.

We used the support from Oracle Exadata to complete the implementation.

Mainly all the patching and updates are handled directly by the Oracle support team.

The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate Oracle Exadata a seven out of ten.

My primary use case of this solution is running the large database status regarding applications.

The cost of the product could be improved.

I have been using this solution for around ten years.

This is a very stable solution, which we have hardly any problems with.

The tech support for this product is fine, though sometimes they take some time to identify and rectify issues.

The installation took around one month.

We installed the database using an in-house team but Oracle prefers to do the box configuration themselves.

I would recommend this solution, particularly if you are running Oracle databases. I would rate this solution as an 8 out of 10.

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.

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 flash cache. Let's say you have brought it in at the application level. You don't want to change your code. You take the object, you put it in the flash, and it runs fast.

The biggest benefit for organization is the performance. That's it. That's the endgame. We want to satisfy the client. When they click, they get it fast, and that's it.

Also, the fact that it reduces your IO because the storage and the server, everything's in the same box, makes it easier and faster.

Support.

It is stable.

Well, they give you a box. We haven't come to a case where we need to add more servers or nodes to it. For the moment, what we have is what we're using and it's doing what it's supposed to do.

Our main issue is the CPU; they can't cope with what we want. The application is CPU-bound. They have to find a way, talk to Intel, design something, so it's fast, so it can provide more CPU, more bang for the buck. It's expensive.

It depends on what the ticket is about. It's easy to open a ticket. Now, to get solution on this ticket, that's a different story because they start asking for all the logs. You give them the logs, and they still want more logs; all this time, the problem is not resolved. That’s not particular to the Exadata platform; it's a general Oracle issue. It can be an arduous process.

Also, when you open the ticket, you don't get a senior guy right away; you get a junior person. You have to complain, and say, "Guys I know what I'm talking about, move it.", before they go to the next level. Then, you get who you want. That's another issue, but they have been there for many years. They need to improve their technical support.

If you know what you’re doing, initial setup is no big deal.

We also evaluated Superdome. We decided to go with the Oracle product because we are an Oracle shop. Oracle has intelligence on what it's doing. It integrates really well.

The main thing I would tell people is, whoever is going to maintain it has to know what he's doing. When you spend your money and you don't have the good people, you don't get your money back. It's a waste of money. You have to know who you are putting on it, so they can give everything back to you. Otherwise, it's a good product.

It's a good product. It's stable.