Oracle Exadata Reviews

The most valuable feature would be Smart Scan because it gives us the ability to perform a large amount of processing on the storage side, cutting down on I/O tremendously. That's one of the big features that really drew us into jumping on Exadata.

We also like having the ability to have a lot of flash storage where a lot of our data can be in-memory, which speeds up transactions and processing.

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Exadata helps us to consolidate and manage our databases as one with much faster processing. This, of course, is the key in speeding up our ability to do work and provide customer service. We're a mutual fund company, so speed is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. Exadata really gives us the key factors from an IT perspective, which are performance and availability.

There's a lot with Exadata that can be done on a black-box level which depends entirely on what the vendor is able to do for you, which is good from a certain perspective. But we hope, as this technology matures, Oracle allows customers to have a little more hands-on customization of some certain elements to better suit their environments. So we're looking forward to the ability to do greater customizations to suit our business needs.

Deployment wasn't difficult and we had no issues with it. Oracle had a bad rap in the past with customers who had bigger systems. They didn't provide them with enough assistance in order to assimilate new products and tools. But now, they've done a pretty good job of creating a very thorough cookbook, which has helped a lot with issues they we and my peers at other companies have had. Some of the issues was in the way we set up our enterprises which made it difficult to bring in and assimilate new products, but Oracle has lately done a good job of smoothing that out.

Exadata has been a very stable product once configured properly. We've had no issues with instability.

It's scaled to our needs.

We have premier-level technical support, so we have a pretty good relationship with them.

I would describe the initial setup as being of medium complexity. We're a financial insurance company, so we always want to put in a lot of rigor, in terms of security and compliance. At times, it's not our own fault, but it's our devices, but at the same time, the price of being exploited is bigger than what it takes to ensure security and compliance. The issue has been really more of the rigor that we put in ourselves, and finding a way to allow those new products and solutions to work as they were expected through our hardening that we've done on our environment.

We want to stay at the front of the cutting edge, and we evaluate and realize that the benefit, the return on investment that Exadata brings for a company of our magnitude and size, is tremendous. We've exploited Exadata, and it's performed very well for us.

When you talk about Exadata, the phrase that comes to mind is "database consolidation." We are consolidating 28 different databases from the revenue authority in Exadata. Fortunately, close to 70 percent of those databases are on Oracle, but they were all on Oracle 11g. We migrated them to 12c, and now we are pumping them into 19c to transfer them to the new Exadata X9M.

Exadata is a fantastic machine. Two features stand out. The first is the resource input/output management tool that allows you to manage the resources to the neck on the Exadata box. 

The second feature I like is ROC. I come from a data center background, so I've been doing storage and fabric interconnection to all that stuff. With ROC, where the fabric interconnection or the Brocade goes out of use, the data goes directly from storage to computation. It's great. 

I liked Spark, but it was discontinued when Exadata L6 came back. I loved it, and I wish they would bring back Spark integration.  

I started working on Exadata in 2018. I was the first person in East Africa to be certified in Exadata in 2013, and I'm proud of that. In the past five months, I've been deploying Exadata for a government revenue authority as a consultant.

Exadata's database consolidation can save a lot of money. For example, one current customer was spending close to $800,000 on database licensing, but they are looking at $250,000 after consolidation.

If I walk into the office of any customer and I want to sell my Exadata, I tell the finance officer, "Boss, I plan to bring down your license costs by half." That's what I'll tell them. "If you want to see the magic, that's what I plan to do for you."

I rate Oracle Exadata 10 out of 10.

I am using Oracle Exadata for financial projects.

Parallelism is the most valuable feature.

The scalability can be improved as it is not a parallel execution.

The license is expensive and has room for improvement.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for 15 years.

I give the stability of Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.

I give the scalability of Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.

We are a platinum member for support.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment was done by a consultant and took one hour.

The implementation was completed by a consultant.

We pay for an annual license and it is expensive.

I give Oracle Exadata a nine out of ten.

We have around 10,000 users.

We have 15 administrators and three consultants that help with maintenance.

I recommend Oracle Exadata.

Oracle Exadata is our calling and banking solution that provides an emergency financial system for our process. The system also collects data from Oracle databases, which requires the manpower of qualified engineers.

According to the engineering team, and I agree, the most valuable features are the voucher, certification, and quick support. 

The problem resolution times with the solution are much higher. This information is based on our databases and our drive.

The cost of the solution is high and can be improved.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I give the stability of the solution an eight out of ten.

To scale up with Oracle we have to purchase new infrastructure. I give the scalability a six out of ten.

We previously used Sophos for a ten-year run.

The solution is already reconfigured but not the system, only the semantics. Our network cables and the valves, the main areas such as the connectivity part, that's the network. Once they are completed and databases are accessible the configuration part has to be done. Overall the initial setup is straightforward and according to the manager's words, it's convenient to be able to reconfigure the system on the solution.

The ease of setup is an eight out of ten.

The deployment is not done overnight. In order to ensure our system management has little impact on the business area, the deployment is done in stages. Bringing on a new version update would only take a few days to test and test the environment. We have to verify and extract some information in order to improve the environment. Once all the testing is complete, we can move into the live environment. Full deployment will take one and a half to two months.

I give the pricing of the solution a five out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

When it comes to Oracle, I think it's a good investment. I know it's not cheap, but they offer excellent service and support. They are always looking to improve and customize their services, which is why my organization continues to use Oracle.

We have 5,000 employees in the organization. More than 2,000 people use our platform daily. This means my team, supported by Oracle and our co-banking system running on Oracle, is prepared for at least 2,000 people to use the solution daily.

New users should have the proper technical knowledge of the operator and that only requires having the right tools and contacting Oracle for support. Another important factor is the company's aftersales support. This ensures that we will be able to get the necessary care and service we need in order to keep our solution running smoothly. Plus, it's always good to have a company we can count on for renewing our solution the following year.

Workload offloading to the cell layer : Exadata is Oracle's engineered system which SW and HW are compatible and contains many layers (compute nodes – networking – storage or cells), so compute nodes receives request or transactions then offload their processing to the cell through InfiniBand switches and this storage or cells contains high speed flash memory and Exadata driver software that has many features that provide high performance.

High availability of each component and everything is redundant: as I mentioned before Exadata conations many layers each one of them is redundant for example at least there are two clustered compute nodes contains databases homes, instances, binaries...etc. these clustered nodes are active/active, so if one of the go down the work will continue so this is High availability and redundancy for compute nodes layer, this similar to InfiniBand Switches and storage failure groups.

Smart scan feature and the flash memory: it is part of Exadata driver software which is preinstalled on cells storage which provides the compute node with the required selected data or rows only not the whole tables as normal ASM, so filtering is done at the level cell by using the flash memory.

• Exadata accelerates the performance to whole applications in the environment at least by 2-3x times than the old hardware.
• One consolidated environment for all Oracle databases.

• The integration between Exadata and Enterprise Cloud Manager should be included out of the box by default and should be agent-less, just discovery only; or, add an embedded and dedicated monitoring and management UBI tool for all HW and SW of Exadata.
• Enhance the monitoring and alerts part related to Exadata with EM.
• All firmware, OS, cells SW, etc. (quarterly patching for Exadata) upgrade and patching should be easily done through EM.
• Physical KVM is required, as in the old version; Cisco management switch is the only single point of failure.

I have used it for three years.

Some steps failed during the deployment by using one command utility to do all deployment steps by one command; so, we divided the deployment steps, then solved each issue separately until we successfully finished the development.

We have not encountered any stability issues; it is a stable box.

Until now, we did not scale.

Customer service is 7/10.

Technical support is 6/10.

We previously used normal HW, then moved to VMware, then moved to Exadata to get good performance and consolidated platform for DBs.

The initial setup is clear but you have to be careful while filling out the OEDA (Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant) tool as it will generate an XML file that contains all of the required configurations for everything, like networks, storage, clusters, etc.. This file will be used during the initial setup.

We implemented it through the vendor; I rate their level of expertise about 7/10.

At first glance, it is expensive because it contains many HW and SW components and provides high availability, as you have to buy licenses for DB, RAC, packs, and Exadata drivers SW per disk. But, if you are going to use it in a consolidated way for all Oracle databases, I think the price will be reasonable, as you have many DBs. There are many sizes for Exadata, so you have to choose the suitable one for your organization according to proper sizing. For licensing, the minimum license number is 8 cores, which are available for Exadata X5-2 and X6-2.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated HPE HW including flash memory and SSD disks, but it was more expensive at that time.

The team should be familiar with RAC; some HW and network knowledge. The team should understand the new Exadata SW related to the cell layer.

Consider the COD feature to pay as you go. Integrating Exadata with Oracle Cloud Enterprise Manager gives you the power of monitoring and managing the box. You can also enable the notification mailer through EM or cell.

It's about consolidation of my infrastructure, scalability, high performance, and availability. These are the main factors that led me to choose this solution, as well as the cost. Exadata saves on my storage costs. All our costs were reduced significantly, and that was the reason why we went back to Exadata.

On the improvement side, they’re pretty much good. With the latest version, X6-2, we have enhanced the storage capacity. It was 4 TB each disk, now it’s 8 TB each disk; essentially same size appliance with more storage space. That request has been heard and we're able to mitigate that. Increased storage was one thing and they have definitely done better on the IO of flash storage. They implemented that; pretty much good stuff.

We have not had any major problems with stability.

From time to time, we scale capacity up and out. In system engineering terms, we can scale up to limit. The kind of features we just set it up, I've been able to fit my requirements into that.

We have Oracle’s Platinum support, which has been pretty good. However, the people are not always knowledgeable. I always rely on my best contacts in Oracle to get the right support. Even though we have Platinum Support, my last delay was my contacts in Oracle.

Initial setup was very much straightforward. Not as much manpower is required as we used to need. Before, if you wanted to manage a server, you had to have a server administrator, the storage administrator, and a DBA administrator. Now all three functions are combined into one person. A data administrator can perform the role of storage administrator, your host administrator, platform administrator, as well as database administrator. It's like several persons reduced to one.

I would definitely recommend this product if cost is not a factor. The implementation costs are, frankly, higher, but your return on investment over a period of time is less. If you're looking for that, then I would definitely advise to go for this product.

Most, if not all of the time, a database workload is a disk I/O-bound, not CPU nor memory. The most time spent in a database operation is reading a data block from or writing a data block to physical disks. This is true for any type of workloads -- small or large block read and write, sequential or random access. The Exadata technology minimizes this bottleneck by utilizing

1. Oracle's proprietary intelligent storage software which understands Oracle database I/O characteristics and thus is able to minimize number of disk I/O, and
2. High-speed Infiniband network for storage network (40 Gb/sec throughput, 5 times higher than the typical fibre channel used for SAN).

There are several scenarios in which this technology can help. Most package (COTS) software are not designed, and therefore are not optimized, for a specific database platform, e.g. Oracle. Performance starts becoming a problem when the database size and workload (e.g. transaction rate) are high. Even if you, as a customer, have reached out to vendor support, chances are they are not going to customize their code just for one database platform, Oracle. They may help you to do small tuning here and there, but without optimizing the application code, the result is limited. Exadata comes as a quick fix in this situation. Oracle Exadata will sweep the problem under the carpet.

Secondly, most applications have a mixed-workload, not purely OLTP and not purely batch/reporting. Unfortunately in many aspects, database tuning for the fastest response (as in OLTP workload) and for the highest throughput (as in reporting/DSS workload) are a contradiction. Again, Oracle Exadata can be a quick fix by minimizing the number of I/O on a fast and high-throughput storage network. It helps on any kind of workloads.

With its value proposition, Exadata is being used to run mission-critical, 24x7 applications. Unfortunately, not all hardware in the Exadata rack are hot-swappable (such as memory, processor and battery maintenance in older models), and therefore business application downtime may be required for those hardware replacements.

Infiniband cabling work may need a complete downtime as well, for example, when we need to connect multiple racks.

I have been working with Exadata, since its X2 generation about five years ago. Since then, I have worked with its X3, X4 and, currently, the latest X5 generation. Each generation comes in three models based on the number of sockets in each of database server, -2 (for example X5-2) and -8 (for example X4-8). I have not had a chance to work with the X5-8 model, which was released less than five months ago. However, there is no fundamental difference from the previous generation X4-8, other than more processing power and memory due to newer hardware.

As in any technology deployment, software bugs and misconfiguration are possible. I have dealt with a few bugs and misconfigurations that have caused application downtime in the past.

We have no issues with its stability.

You should start with a small footprint (for example, a quarter-rack Exadata) and then grow to a full-rack or even multi-rack Exadata. The only challenge is that by the time you need to expand, the Exadata generation may have evolved (every one to two years, so far). You may end up with a full-rack of Exadata that contains multiple generations, each with a different CPU, memory, and disk capacity. This may not be a big problem, but you have to come up with a strategy to distribute the workload.

Oracle Exadata comes with Platinum Support, which is a premium support and includes regular (quarterly) patching/version upgrade activity and fault monitoring. I think this is a right approach by Oracle. As an engineered system, there is a lot of version compatibility between firmwares, operating systems, and softwares that must be taken care of for a patching and image upgrade. This definitely would be a huge responsibility if customers had to deal with this.

What everyone needs to understand is that Exadata is a database consolidation platform, and is not designed as a virtualization platform. Therefore, there are security considerations if you plan to use Exadata to host multiple applications that require certain levels of segregation at the network, storage, and operating system levels.

What makes Exadata different than competitors is that it is not designed only for a specific application (as in SAP HANA), and is not only for a certain type of workload (as in Teradata).

It is called an engineered system, but there are options that Oracle offers to its customers. Customers need to complete a configuration generator tool called Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant (OEDA). Based on the selection made on the tool, configuration file is generated and this will be a 'binding contract' between customers and field engineers who will do the initial setup. The problem is that it is the customer's responsibility to make the right options and some of them are not easy to understand. I suggest the customer not to hesitate to get assistance from Oracle Pre-sales and to go through each of possible options in detail and to understand all consequences.

Initial setup is always done by an Oracle field engineer, up to creation of an empty database. Infrastructure cabling and data center power are usually done by contractors. From the support standpoint, Exadata is just the same Oracle database servers and Linux/Solaris servers.

The solution is relatively easy and fast to deploy. It typically takes less than three weeks from hardware delivery to having functional database servers with a built-in high-availability feature. Most importantly, it delivers an excellent Oracle database performance for any type of workload (OLTP or batch/OLAP). I have seen from 3x to 10x performance improvement for various workloads compared to previous versions. The reason I didn't give a perfect 10 rating is because some hardware are not hot-swappable, such as battery (for older models), memory and processor. While as a matter of fact, this is an important feature of a platform for an enterprise mission-critical application.

What often is confusing for many is the support model of Exadata. Many think Exadata is a black box or appliance that will be supported entirely by Oracle. It is not an appliance or a black box. It is just a bunch of regular Oracle database servers and Linux (or Solaris) servers as storage servers. It needs DBAs and system administrators to take care of it and work with vendor support in case of incidents or patching.

The most valuable feature is the integration of the various components that make the performance soar. More specifically the presence of storage indexes along with the Exadata Storage Server software, which delivers process offloading, allows us to deliver better performance without indexes--saving space and CPU. This innovative feature is not something we would be able to replicate with other solutions. In addition, we consider the features smart scan, smart flashcache, smart flash log and hybrid columnar compression very useful.

Prior to Exadata, we were relying on daily ETLs from multiple source systems to load data into base tables, then we prepared a summary and materialized views from the base to data marts which were eventually exposed to the end users. This process used to take 18 hours. So, the data was always at least 18 hours late, and occasionally later, if the ETLs failed. This caused two issues: first, most managers simply were not able to make quick decisions because the data was stale and second, for most important functions, the users got the data from our OLTP system which taxed that system's capacity.

After Exadata, we observed three immediate benefits:

• The ETLs finish in 3 hours (down from 18), making the data fresh and enabling the managers to make quick decisions. Campaigns used to take days but take a few hours now
• Users no longer go to the OLTP system, reducing the impact there and saving us from upgrades
• There is no need to build summaries; so some of the data is available almost immediately, allowing most decisions to be taken on near-realtime data which was impossible pre-Exadata

There are three possible enhancements:

• Build a stronger, more responsive support team.
• Add a RAID-5 like storage layout for customers to save space with the full understanding that performance will be less (which could be fine for non-prod systems).
• Add storage level replication without the use of Data Guard, which is quite useful in case of organizations that rely on that technology for their Disaster Recovery effort.

I've used it for 4 years

Yes; mostly due to the database version being different. We were upgrading from 10g to Exadata which ran 11g; so there were some issues we had to overcome; but those were expected. Quite honestly, our deployment was smooth in Exadata itself due to our deep understanding of the technology. Without it, I am not sure if it would have been that smooth.

Yes; the initial versions had a lot of firmware issues that caused the cells to reboot, which caused the ASM software to rebalance the diskgroups. It mostly occurred in the X2 system. The X4 system has been quite stable. However, it's important to point out that Oracle generally releases firmware updates quite fast to remove any stability issues. We encountered them because we didn't apply these due to our internal reasons.

No; scalability has been pretty awesome.

It leaves a lot to be desired. It has improved; but still a lot to go. I rate it 6 on a 10 point scale.

I gave an overall rating of 9 to Exadata X4 due to the quality of support personnel during installation and after sales events. That is going up but still leaves something to be desired.

We used Oracle database on HPUX. We switched because it was impossible to deliver performance without additional indexes. Indexes took up space and slowed down data insertion performance. Exadata solved these by enhancing performance without the need for indexes.

Oracle sends professional installers for installation and deployment. So it was fairly simple. However, as I mentioned earlier, we do have a deep technical expertise base so it worked in our favor. Without that expertise, I can't be sure if would not have been complex.

We implemented everything with our in house team.

Yes, we did evaluate Teradata, Netezza and Greenplum.

First and foremost, develop or hire a deep technical talent base inhouse, even if it's just one person. The technical role is called Database Machine Administrator (DMA). Planning is winning half the battle. There are tiny little things that makes a big difference. For instance, how to decide whether to keep the indexes you have--it's not something you can outsource. Second, get the installation checklist (detailed) from Oracle and establish SLAs for each item meticulously along with the hand off details. Third, if you don't have it, consider Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control to manage the Exadata system. Fourth, decide to use Oracle Platinum Support (free for Exadata) from day one. Finally, get ready to be wowed.

The innovative use of all the technologies integrated so creatively and functionally that it provides an immense performance boost impossible to attain with do it yourself systems. For instance the secret sauce is Exadata Storage Server (ESS) software, which is unique to Exadata, can't be replicated even with other massively parallel systems.