Oracle Exadata Reviews

It enables us to consolidate, that's one thing. We have consolidated five databases into one box, so that definitely a cost-savings there. We migrated from ODS to X5-2, so that is one thing.

The second thing of course are the extra features like the storage indexes. In short, the main feature that we take advantage of is the intelligence within the  storage which makes it no longer a "dumb storage" server. That is another main thing.

We did some PoC tests with our own data, and we were really getting 10x using Hybrid Columnar Compression, unique to Exadata, so some cost savings there.

Those are the things. Performance has gotten better, less footprint, and consolidation.

Including the migration, it's around a little more than a year now.

It has been pretty stable. We haven't seen many issues. Yes, we have hit some bugs, but otherwise it's pretty stable. It's a lot of mature boxes now. It's, again, an X5-2; it's mature enough.

We have a half rack now. If we at all feel like we need more compute, we can definitely add on more racks. So scalability, definitely a yes.

It is excellent. In our organization, my team did the first migration, so it was all new to everyone. From the installation team to internal support teams, and my team which is the application DBAs, which really worked on the migration. Checking stuff and letting us know if there were any changes to be made; for all of those, even with the migration, we got excellent support.

That was part of the agreement between the parties, that they would help us with the first migration.

We were using ODS.

Personally, my requirements when looking for in a vendor: Definitely one is they have to be leading in that technology in the industry. The vendor should also make me want to use the latest proven technologies, we cannot take chances with that. Whichever is the case, whatever we are using a product for, that particular product has to be the industry best. That is one thing.

Another thing is definitely that it needs to be a known partner like Oracle. They know the people we know, so that gives comfort that, middle of the night, if you have an issue, you can call this person. In short, proven support.

Smart scan and smart indices are the most valuable features.

It improved the query performance.

I would like to see improvement in retail store response times.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were deployment issues, but the dev team fixed them.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

I would give customer service a rating of 7/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The installation was straightforward with Oracle support.

We implemented with Oracle.

Stability, high ROI and low TCO. Plus performance, of course. Being able to compress the data, especially in big size databases, has been extremely useful as HCC can deliver quite high compression rates. The business benefits of OES are as many as the pure technical benefits/features.

Exadata with the In-Memory option is several levels about SAP HANA.

In the past, Infrastructure units were mostly organized in teams like the Database team, the Storage team, the Backup team, the Unix team, the Monitoring team, etc. Now, with Exadata, they have become sort of obsolete. Only one unit is needed for administering the whole stack, which means a lot of savings on IT level.

The Initial investment price could use improvement. It is often the stumbling block. Many organizations have limited or small budgets for the initial investment. This has somehow changed with X5 when the entire Exadata configuration no longer needs to be licensed when using OracleVM.

I've used this solution since 2008. For the past 4 years, Exadata and more broadly speaking, Oracle Engineered Systems, are occupying almost all my working time so my exposure to the product is as much as one can get. My review answers also include my experiences with other Oracle products, including Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance X5.

Only during the first month or so of new generation Exadata machines, when the initial scripts have not been properly modified to reflect the new generation machine. Often, when proper sizing isn't done in advance, or even worse when sizing hasn't been done at all, the load can been too much for the servers. This is however an extreme case and has nothing to done with the Exadata frames.

No. Their stability, in fact, is the main benefit from Exadata. When Exadata is in production, what clients tend to agree upon is that stability is of paramount importance. Several clients have had absolutely no downtime after deployment. Downtime nowadays for most enterprises, to put it simply, is money. Not to mention the image and the reputation. This is so hard to be included in pre-TCO studies as estimating such losses is rather difficult. The stability that Exadata brings solves this major issue entirely.

No. It is quite simple to extend the configurations if needed, more databases can easily be added. With Exadata less memory is needed so we see clients running even close to 100 databases on a small 1/8^th frame. With large databases, clients can sometimes run out of storage, but additional storage can easily be added with the help of storage expansion racks.

The Platinum support has been useful to most of the clients. It helps IT organization eliminate the internal need to spend time and efforts on patching and monitoring the Exadata boxes. It allows them to concentrate on other tasks.

Sometimes it takes too long time to get help with technical issues. At times, clients get frustrated with being asked the same questions multiple times. I would rate the Oracle technical support as good.

In the past, the complexity of building your own database environment was a long and tedious process. From deciding on the hardware and the operating system, to installation, patching, creating and configuring the database... It took such a long time that the benefits of the Exadata appliance are more than obvious nowadays. In a make-it-all-yourself solution, identifying the problems took a long time, and sometimes issues were never identified. The all-by-one-vendor approach has its benefits. Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket, is what I would say.

It depends on who does the initial setup. The process is definitely straightforward and not that complex at all. For example, the Accenture Enkitec Group is strongly specialized in these types of setups.

The Accenture Enkitec Group, with 450+ implementation, is by far the leading team in performing such tasks. There is a separate team within AEG specialized in patching and configuring Oracle Engineered Systems.

It varies from client to client depending on several factors but it is almost always when the cut-even period is approx. 12-18 months after the initial investment. The TCO of OES is much lower than similar systems like VCE’s Vblock, HP’s Converged system, and IBM’s PureFlex system, Teradata, etc.

The TCO of the Exadata Cloud Service is even better than the one of on-premise!

There is no single answer to this question. It varies from client to client depending on the size of the systems included in the setup.

IBM POWER, SAP HANA, VCE Vblock and Teradata.

If a company is looking into Oracle Engineered Systems, I would suggest first that a health check is performed on the current system, in addition to making a PoC on the (new) systems under consideration.

In the history of Oracle Corporation, there seldom has been a product so successful, complete and flawless. Client satisfaction is extremely high and stability of systems using Exadata is close to infinite availability.

The most valuable feature is definitely the storage offload; the fact that, as you're executing your SQL, it's segregated out to a storage device, and the database itself doesn't have to take that overhead. We've noticed a huge improvement in execution.

It has definitely improved my organization, because it's an engineered solution. It's not pieces and parts from different vendors. Having the one-vendor solution that's fully supported by Oracle, it doesn't require us to have the number of staff that it used to in a more distributed environment. We've definitely got some efficiencies from a staffing model because of it.

I'd like to see them improve more of the reporting capabilities of Enterprise Manager for the Exadata plug-in.

It's definitely been stable for us; over a four-year period, we had zero outages. It's been rock solid.

We’ve had experience scaling it. We started out originally with an X2, the second release of Exadata. A year ago, we expanded that with the new X5. We were able to take our existing procurement and expand it with newer hardware too.

We definitely have noticed that technical support has gone down, unfortunately. The quality of support; it takes a lot longer to get tickets resolved than it did four years ago, when we first bought the Exadata. We're an engineered systems customer. That's supposed to have more platinum-level support model to it. We have not experienced that recently.

It was end of life for our previous hardware. We had to buy something. The Exadata just seemed to be a better solution.

Initial setup was very simple, actually. Getting all of the right network information was really the critical path for it, but once that was done, the actual install and configuration was very simple.

The replacement hardware was ironically Sun. Because Oracle procured Sun, they just became our natural progression.

When I’m choosing a vendor to work with, I look at the reliability of the actual hardware solution itself and then also the support. Even though tech support has not been very good for us, our Oracle reps have stayed with us and want us to be successful. They help us try and navigate the Oracle waters.

Know what versions of hardware are out there, for any type of an engineered solution. Understand where there might not be redundancy in the solution, to know if that's going to meet your needs or not.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I probably wouldn't give anyone a perfect rating. It's met all of our expectations.

We work on data warehouses and data marts.

The tool performs well with a large database. It is easy to integrate the tool with other ELT solutions. The performance and data transformation are excellent. We recommend it to our clients. The tool has good storage technologies.

The product must make more investments in object storage technologies. Six to seven years ago, the product had an SQL-based analytics feature that did not work well. The vendor must consider investing in it. The analytics features must be improved.

I have been using the solution for more than ten years.

Oracle Exadata is a robust product.

We must pay more money if we need more storage. I rate the product’s scalability a ten out of ten. The tool is suitable for enterprises and SMBs.

I rate the tool’s pricing a three out of ten. The solution is expensive.

Teradata is a competitor. If we use Teradata, we must use their data warehouse model.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

The solution is used for Extreme Bare metal and virtual compute performance for the business to scale up as per the heterogeneous database loads.

Exadata has greatly benefited our business cycle as operational efficiency has improved by 200%.

Also, our business analytics platform performance has improved by 300%

Exadata uses a scale-out design with unique optimizations that include persistent memory, SQL query offload, and built-in resource management to optimize performance for OLTP, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads running in consolidated environments.

• Exadata Smart Flash Cache - caches database objects with flash memory operations.
• Integrated appliance with all components supported by one vendor, Oracle.

• It needs built-in big data features.
• I'd like to see smart auto-healing features with machine-learning libraries.
• Less power consumption would be nice.
• It needs integrated cloud software to enable cloud connectivity.

Exadata X9M uses a combination of scale-out storage, RDMA over Converged Ethernet networking, database offload, persistent memory accelerator, and PCIe Flash to deliver extremely high performance from memory and flash.

We have been using the solution for ten years.

There were no stability issues.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

Oracle customer service is the best in the industry.

Technical Support:

Technical support for Exadata is the best in the industry.

Positive

Traditional Oracle RAC to Oracle Exadata RAC due to having scalable and robust database consolidated platform for upcoming release 12.2, which can consolidate multi-character sets within a single container and heterogeneous data guard support.

It was a bit complex to fit in with our business requirements initially, but post-implementation it was great. It will work as the most stable and scalable database ever run on Linux with various complex workloads.

We implemented it in-house and advisors for major global Exadata deployments helped.

We have seen a 300% ROI.

Oracle needs to reduce the licensing cost to get more market penetration and offer an Open Financing Option.

We evaluated SAP HANA and other relevant platform for analytics.

I would truly recommend this to all SMEs and Big Enterprises for consolidating databases with a unified next-generation platform.

All business Oracle databases were spread across many DB servers and different platforms. We consolidated all of our databases onto a single Exadata box to ensure that they were running on the same platform and have greater coordination and integration between the databases. Also, we gained performance without much change in the database code, as well as saved a greater amount of space by applying the compression feature. 

We experienced a significant performance improvement without changing the code, simply utilizing Oracle Exadata standard smart features including Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, and Storage Indexes.

We saved a great amount of storage by applying different levels of HCC and removing ninety percent of the indexes. This is a powerful and extremely stable system with IB network speed.

Most of the Exadata features are enabled by default, without the need for configuration. For example, the smart features include Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Storage Indexes, and IB 40GB. 

Compression is a great feature, where one can really save a lot of storage.

Oracle has introduced Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and autonomous features for automatic database tuning. The new addition of X8M has come with a direct memory read future to deliver amazing performance for all sorts of OLTP and analytics workloads. This should benefit the Exa community.

General perception from many customers is the cost and maintenance of exadata database machine. Although Oracle recently introduced low cost storage and automated many features, still the cost and maintenance is a concern. Oracle should provide free of cost the Exadata software on the box to have more customers.

We have been using this solution for more than eight years.

Every component in the Oracle Exadata database is redundant. Hence, it provides HA for every layer.

This solution offers the flexibility to add more servers, storage servers, or a combination of both.

Oracle support service needs more improvement.

We haven't used Engineered Systems for Oracle database platforms, though, we were on various platforms that were difficult to manage and maintain.

The bare metal setup is done by Oracle professionals and managed by them. Though, customers can manage this on their own, depending on the skill set of their team.

Our implementation was done on-site, through the vendor.

We realize ROI through higher throughput, high availability, and business continuity.

Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution.

We compared other market players of Engineered systems. However, Oracle Exadata features are unmatched by other players in the market.

Oracle is coming out with many advanced hardware additions and software solutions to make this product the world's best database machine.

• Smart Scan
• Smart Flash Cache
• High Availability
• Consolidation
• Robust Storage
• Computing

Because of Exadata Systems, we were able to consolidate all the applications databases into one, e.g, Oracle EBS, Siebel, Hyperion etc.

Exadata Linux systems have Intel CPUs inside. I would suggest that if Oracle could work together with Intel to have some more intelligence at the CPU level, then there would be nothing like it.

I've been using it since June 2013.

We didn't have any deployment issues.

After three to four months we may need to perform a rolling reboot of the DB/storage servers.

I would say it's the best solution in terms of scalability.

8/10.

9/10.

We used both EMC Storage and IBM Servers.

The setup was simple, however, the database migration was a bit challenging, but there was no show stopper anywhere.

We are a vendor TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) and have as a customer the Taj Group of Hotels (IHCL), where we deployed and implemented Exadata Systems.

It's almost 100%.

• IBM
• HP

Go for it if you are looking for consolidation/scalability.