Oracle Exadata Reviews

Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement.

One of the things that we are facing during these few months is how you manage the people environment, and it's something that we have to explore to understand what is happening inside these machines. 

We are facing some problems with authentication. I believe that we are not familiar with the Oracle virtual machines. That's why we need to improve ourselves to better understand what is going on inside this environment. 

The integration with third-party applications regarding access management security could be better. I would like that to be included and be available the first time. Most of them, we need to buy later, and we would like to have these components when we're actually testing if this component.

This is one thing that we are facing here in our environment. The integration becomes very difficult, and most of these features are not available the first time when you finalize the integrations.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for about six months. 

Oracle Exadata is a stable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle technical support a seven. The involvement of Oracle's people is something that they have to improve because they are operating in very poor countries. We need to clarify with them because the technical people's availability must be well organized for the job to go smoothly. 

Another thing is the language. We speak Portuguese, and the technical people don't speak another language. It starts to get very difficult to work like this. We are not English, and they are not English, and it becomes very difficult to communicate. 

They are the ones with the solution, so they are brilliant at working with Oracle. We can solve all the issues. They have time to share their experience with us. That's one thing that I stated to those guys working on this implementation.

The initial setup was straightforward. But this particular situation is different because we are not talking about putting it on and going into production. We have to move the initial systems to these environments. 

We need to convert some systems to be compatible with those environments. The main challenge is the IT infrastructure. It is not like we buy it, open it, create and edit it. We need to move, and that is the challenge. Right now, we are in the middle of finalizing this movement with migration from legacy to the new environment.

From a technical point of view, it didn't take long because it's straightforward. We started and went step by step until the end or until the machine was available for migration. It was very simple.

We worked with a technical team from Oracle, and our partners supported us and helped us do that. But most of the time, it was between my team and Oracle.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle Exadata ten.

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.

Usually, the I/O operation is a more intensive and costly one. In any transaction processing, the I/O is a more expensive operation due to storage and better performance. That's where most of the latency and time would be spent in overall flow. Exadata has an additional service and computing power at the storage level as well which reduces this latency. Usually it's available only on the high-end machines.

Exadata as a platform is a complete solution, where you have CPU memory with an additional server and inter-cell storage. That's the beauty of Exadata; IOPS and good overall latency and that's why we like it. We use it for the transaction processing, especially for production.

In terms of improvement, related to other products when we were running down the physical servers, we ran into some issues. We are always on the latest stack so at this point of time we are self-sufficient. Once we deployed Exadata, we never had to look back, at least in recent times.

One improvement would be the limitation on the storage. For example, when we buy with a double or triple CN, it comes with some storage. Once we reach that point, we don't have any other option. This was in the old version. We don't know how it is improved in the current version; maybe there is a way to optimize it and we can have additional storage allocated. In the earlier versions, we didn't have this possibility and we need to upgrade to a later version of Exadata to get more storage.

I have used this product for more than 4 or 5 years.

It's a stable solution but it comes with a price. You get performance and there is a cost associated with the performance. The Exadata tool is best when you can afford. You get best quality, in terms of the overall product features.

It depends on each case, your use and the company. For us, it is scalable and working for our use.

For me, what we have right now is scalable and it is serving our purpose.

They have a dedicated team exclusively for Exadata. Whenever we ran into some issues with the tool, they nailed it down. The support was good in Oracle because this is a prestigious product from Oracle. They have their support model.

The most valuable features are the high columnar compression and the flash cache. Basically, the whole I/O subsystem is valuable, but those two features are really big for us.

Pricing.

I have been using it for close to five years.

It is very stable. We were on X2; that was not as stable. There were some battery issues with some of the flash cache cards. We're on X5 and X4 now and that's much better; many more IOPS, so that's been great.

It is scalable, very much so. It will absolutely meet the company's needs going forward.

The support for troubleshooting issues is OK; it's fine.

The support for patching – we have Platinum Support – is probably one of the worst I have ever experienced in my career. We've been trying to upgrade to the latest version of 11g R2 and we haven't done it. The last few times we've tried to do it, they were supposed to be able to upgrade without downtime, but the last two or three times, we've had downtime. We have very little trust in Platinum Support to do the upgrades.

Previously, we just used regular Oracle databases on standard hardware. Now, most of our products are on their own silo databases. Now, we're pushing them all to a single Exadata, using Exadata solutions.

We actually contracted the initial setup out, as part of Oracle Platinum Support. We also have another third-party company that did more of the operations on it. When my team finally got to it, everything was set up. It's really a matter of deploying our application on there and then tuning it to be more Exadata specific; not a whole lot. Anything will run on it, but we take advantage of the high columnar compression and the flash cache storage.

As far as cost goes, it's really expensive. The huge price tag on it is the only reason why I have not given it a perfect rating.

If you have the money, spend it; if it makes sense, obviously. If you're really I/O bound, it's a great solution; I/O bound from performance to storage. With the high columnar compression, we're getting close to 10X compression.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I look for one with a good reputation and is reliable. Reputation comes on as willingness to work with you. I consider the features that are offered; is what they're offering now going to scale, obviously? Is what they're offering now going to still be supported in the future? There are compatibility issues and similar items. For example, with Exadata, I'd hate to be the one of only three companies on Exadata in the world and five years from now, nobody remembers what Exadata is.

It is fast and integrated. It combines hardware with the software that we use from Oracle. It's a complete stack, not only for the hardware but the full implementation and delivery, so it’s really good for IT.

We have seen performance and reliability benefits. It's also beneficial from a cost perspective.

We are using it now predominantly as a hardware stack managed by our company. We would love to see it more as a service; a database-as-a-service offering.

It is very stable; no stability issues.

No problems with scalability.

The SRs that we raise are not always resolved in a timely fashion. Often I'm unhappy.

At this moment in time, it is pretty much a straightforward, almost-manual installation. We're looking for some automation around it.

We also looked at other organizations or vendors, as well. We also looked at the database appliance from Oracle.

We decided to go with the Exadata product because of the size of our company.

The Nike one: Just do it.

Oracle Engineered Systems are the best solution for Oracle and non-Oracle applications: hardware and software are combined together to ensure high availability and maximum performance. Oracle Exadata contains all the advantages of standard Oracle Database, but on top of that there are exclusive features such as IORM (IO Resource Manager) and HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression). IORM (in combination with Database Resource Manager (DBRM)) permits you to isolate I/O requests to avoid I/O saturation. HCC provides different levels of compression to reduce space allocation and to decrease I/O.

Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are standard-based. Customers can easily migrate their existing applications based on Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic: they can take advantages of Engineered Systems with minimal effort during the migration process. Customers can benefit from high performance without modifying Java or SQL code and they can decide to use specific features after migrating to Exadata/Exalogic. Also, Engineered Systems can be used to consolidate complex environments: for example, our customer was able to decommission about 20 blades, using a single 1/8 Exalogic x4-2. Finally, Exadata and Exalogic simplifies patching/upgrading process, unifying firmware upgrades, ILOM upgrades, OS patching, Database/WebLogic upgrade/patching in one "single-vendor" activity.

We installed the first Exadata in 2011.

The most critical issue was due to a bug with SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol): after connecting Exalogic and Exadata to the same Infiniband fabric and after enabling SDP listeners on Exadata compute nodes, we faced unexpected and random crashes of database hosts. Fortunately, we discovered that SDP caused the reboot, so we disabled it. We permanently resolved the issue with the latest firmware of Exadata, and after that we can take advantage in terms of performance, of SDP protocol.

We used to perform upgrades of Exadata from quarter to half in order to increase CPU/storage capacity. When Exadata hardware is too old (for example, if you want to upgrade from Exadata X3-2 quarter to half, adding x6-2 hardware), you should evaluate the possibility of installing a new Exadata and using Oracle Data Guard to move Oracle Databases.

6/10

There was no solution in place previously.

Using Exadata and Exalogic, you can get the best performance optimizing the number of CPUs, saving costs on software licensing. Also, if you consolidate your environment using Engineered Systems, you can save money on hardware (storage/compute capacity).

No other options were looked at.

As best practice, before starting the installation you should have a look at the Oracle Documentation. Oracle provides a "Getting Started Guide" to get up-to-date checklists to verify requirements (for example IP addresses, name syntax, etc.) and to be sure your infrastructure is ready for the installation. Also, we recommend to install Oracle Enterprise Manager as a monitoring solution: it is fully integrated with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, you can monitor hardware (compute nodes, switches, ILKOM etc.) and software (operating system, Database, WebLogic, business applications etc.).

Some of the features which are specific to Exadata, like histories, offloading and accurate processing. One of the customers we work with had mostly thousands of batch jobs, which used to take, 30 to 40 hours, with the Exadata, and re-architecturing some of those solutions on the Exadata, moving them. It turned out to be running in one hour, or less than one hour. It's a huge, huge performance gain. And in the end, the company realized the return on the investment they have made into Exadata.

Some of the key benefits with our customers moving to the Exadata, they can get it consolidated, all the databases into one platform, one environment. And other advantages, you get a lot of the new features out of the box of the Exadata itself. We don't have to shelve around a lot of different parts of the machines, the networking component, the storage components, you know, all together, one into one machine, into the Exadata. It's a huge, huge advantage for the customers, right? They don't have to look into the history, they don't have to look into the database machines, you know, networking part of it all income passes in one machine. And Oracle has engineered it specifically for the purpose of data. Optimized the database solutions. So once you move it, you get the benefits of your query optimization, your history optimization, your machine data with computer optimization. Everything is blended into one machine.

The key features with the Exadata is offloading the query processing, some of them, at the storage level. That's where Oracle has to make it smarter. I think it's already smarter, the Exadata storage. I can't think of a specific feature that can put in, but that's where I think there's room for more improvement.

Adaptability is a little bit challenging for the customer because of the licensing and the pricing. That's where I think they can make a big difference.

It's a product which Oracle has built with scalability in mind. You can have Exadata hooked up with another Exadata. You have a really high bandwidth network, they call it Infiniband. So you can extend it horizontally as much as you want. So there's a huge, huge opportunity to upscale it and Exadata itself comes in two different flavors, like quarter rack, half rack, full rack. So you can choose and pick, based on your need of the scalability and the future need of how your workload and other things are going to be in future.

You've got to have some basic understanding of networking, storage, some kind of background in the database. That's where it makes it very easy for you to step in and do the initial set up of configurations. Of course, there are certain sorts of specific tools and utility from Oracle which you have to be aware, you have to talk to Oracle very proactively. Make sure you know all the requirements, you need to do the initial setups. You are aligned with the people in Oracle and you plan it. You know, planning is the key, and if you have those basic understanding of storage, database, the networking, those things. It really makes it easy for you to step it into the initial setup planning.

I think it comes to pricing. I know a lot of people don't have the better understanding of the licensing and other things. That's where it effectively comes, in the initial logistics of dealing and getting it.

I think it's a great solution for all the existing Oracle clients and if they really want to move ahead with the next generation of the Oracle Database, that's the solution to go for. Consolidate everything, move ahead with this. You get a better performance, you get better management, you get less people to manage the things, the room of errors are really less because you have specialized people, less people, and it's very valuable.

Rating: so I'll say that in terms of the rating it will fall in 8 to 9. In terms of the ease of maintenance, you have all the tools and everything Oracle provides. So you don't have to poke around and see what's where, if somebody should come, so where you have to go. If we're really good, you know the Exadata, you know what you're looking for, you talk to Oracle, get those tools, do it. In terms of the performance, you don't have to waste your night, day and night. It's a lot things come built in with the Exadata itself in terms of the price.

• 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.