Oracle Exadata Reviews

Exadata storage is very fast and it gives really good performance. Sometimes people buy a good server with a lot of CPU, pay a lot of money, but they have very poor storage performance and then they don't get enough performance from their system.

Exadata really gives good storage performance and our business applications run very fast.

It's perfect. I don't know what to improve in Exadata.

More than five years.

Very stable. In the last five years there was was just one occasion of downtime because one cell went down and because we had low free disk space. It was a little problem but it was solved.

I don't think it's so scalable because Exadata is a box. You can't do anything with this. It's a box, use it, that's all.

Support is much better for Exadata than for other products. Very fast response and sometimes much faster than for other systems. 

Sometimes if we have a bug on another database, we duplicate the database on Exadata, repeat the bug and they make a patch much faster.

We didn't set it up, Oracle set up Exadata. It's not permitted to set up Exadata by yourself. They bring it to you. It's ready for use.

I totally recommend buying Exadata. It's very good product. I haven't ever seen anything better than Exadata for Oracle Database.

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.

One of the less well appreciated features of engineered systems in general, and Exadata in particular, is the speed with which a customer can get up and running. Having all components, both hardware and software, fully configured, tested, and optimised on delivery is a major customer win.

To fully appreciate this you have to consider the alternative, which is traditionally a best of breed approach, and how long this takes customers, and the effort involved in wiring everything and ensuring full interoperability between both the hardware and software components. Having experienced the issues with this approach many times in the past, the fully converged approach of engineered systems certainly saves a lot of effort.

In addition to the enhanced speed of operational readiness, the other major, but less well appreciated benefit, is one of standardisation. Many large organisations have a wide and varied oracle database, both in terms of hardware and software. A big advantage I have seen is standardisation onto the one hardware platform and a minimal number of software versions. This has improved operational effectiveness.

Several barriers to entry have been overcome with the latest X5 generation, in particular moving to more flexible sizing (elastic configurations) allows customers to choose the exact fit of compute and storage resources they require.

I've used this product for nearly 4 years now. I've used all versions of Exadata from V2, all the way up to X5. This covers 5 generations of enhancements.

Issues encountered tend to business process problems or people problems. The issues tend not to be technical.

In the earlier days of the V2 generation, and with customers pushing the then limited memory and cpu sizings available, stability was not at the levels encountered today.

With properly sized memory parameters and with the later generations of the Exadata software, stability is excellent.

Have worked on expanding racks with multi-generation racks, the promise of start small and grow over time is delivered fairly effortlessly.

Technical support can be patchy, particularly a couple of years back, the number of support personnel with exadata skills was perhaps not at the level it could have been. That being said, I have continually been impressed with the field engineers. I have encountered some who's dedication and commitment to fixing issues went way above what I would have expected.

Storage growth, and the possibility of utilising HCC to drive this down was a large driver for switching.

The initial setup and deployment of an Exadata rack is straightforward it has been well engineered to be a very quick initial setup.

The best advice is to scope upfront. Do a proper sizing exercise, get some outside assistance if you need it to get the sizing correct. If you are looking at a large deployment, consider piloting first, as you don't want to have a large amount of kit landing and then spend a long time on the migration.

performance

This is an engineered system by Oracle. It provides very fast communication between the storage and database. A lot of data processing is done at the storage level.

This makes the queries and processing much faster than before; reports can run within minutes rather than hours.

Cost is very high. It needs to be made affordable to grab more customer base. A lot of the technical enhancements are being made by Oracle regularly. Now, it is available on the cloud also.

If you deploy a normal server setup with SAN or direct disks, the cost is very low. Exadata machine is supplied by Oracle and hardware also maintained by Oracle. They charge as per their standards and pricing. Its quite costly in that regard.

I have used this solution for five years, since about the time it was launched.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues. In fact, scalability is one of its prime features, it is very flexible.

The technical support is, as usual, good from Oracle.

Earlier, we used SAN and the traditional servers. That was also good and time-tested for decades. This is all together a new concept.

It was a normal Oracle database setup.

The price and license costs are high as compared to the normal database setup. It depends on the client's requirements and size of the databases. Clients/ buyers have to take the call.

No other options were available in this category at that time or even now.

You should evaluate your requirements and budget.

I like its reliability. I like the storage cell because of the amount of RAM and memory. It has the ability to do a lot of things, so that it doesn't transfer as much data out as other systems do.

Once we went to Exadata, we started doing statistics on a weekly basis. Between the two of them, things have stabilized quite a bit; didn't need as much tuning, and so it required less DBA time to do that. DBAs were freed up to do other work.

We have a 2X. Because I don't know what the 6X does, I don't know what additional features I’d like to see them include in future releases.

It's very stable and very reliable.

I work with the PeopleSoft systems on the databases and it's doing just fine. I don't have to scale out.

I don't believe we’ve had to use technical support. We had a little bit of help at the beginning to get everything installed; after that, it just ran.

Someone in the upper management decided to spend some money, and we had the machines; he said use them.

I was allowed to help with some of the initial setup. Most of it was handled by the DBA core team; what I did was give some ideas on how we ought to do some things.

What size of database are you working with? What kind of reliability and stability do you need? Is the cost worth what they would get out of the stability.

I like the Oracle database. I find Oracle as a whole has a very stable database. As far as the Exadata is concerned, as I’ve mentioned, I didn't have a choice in the matter. Nonetheless, if given my druthers, I would stick with it because it is reliable, even though it is kind of expensive.

My rating reflects its reliability. If I was rating it just on cost, I would rate it much lower.

Stability and performance.

Provides data analytics and helps with warehouse needs. It helps analyze network performance.

I would like to see improvement in terms of upgrades.

There were deployment issues with the upgrade process. There was conflicting documentation and varying responses from Oracle support.

There were stability issues during upgrades.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give customer support a rating of 5/10. The FEs are usually good and proactive.

Technical support varies wildly.

We used a plain database before this.

We needed Oracle support for all of the setup steps.

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.

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.