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Database Consolidation and Performance are best on this platform. It is tailor-made to run the Oracle database and hence the defaults on this device force you to choose Oracle's best practices. No more moaning by your storage admin that he wants to carve out the Luns, that he doesn't understand ASM stripe and Mirror Everything S.A.M.E, and that he knows better what's good for the Oracle database. With the latest Optane memory and in-memory options, the flash cache becomes even more powerful.
The ability to patch with no downtime and the ability to ensure all the prerequisites are satisfied without manual intervention saves time and effort and makes the systems we deploy for our clients more secure. Licensing costs too are less for Oracle Linux and for clients moving to the Oracle cloud, it is included in the price of the subscription. With the new Exadata cloud @customer offering, there are even more ways to get the benefits of Exadata without large capital expenditure.
Ksplice, Prevalidated Oracle RPMS, the testing done with Oracle database and WebLogic, and the UEK kernel have made Oracle Linux systems best for running large Oracle databases and other packaged applications. Exadata's IORM and DBRM make it a great consolidation platform. Its smart scan feature and flash cache are unparalleled in providing performance.
The new Exadata x9m has an even higher speed of 100GBps connectivity.
We have a little trepidation with the system as it does have a learning curve. Also changing to a binary logging format for us feels like retrograde motion, but sadly almost all Linux variants have moved in this direction.
I have been using this solution for over thirteen years across multiple versions.
We have encountered several predictive disk failures, but we never lost data because the machine detected the issue before the actual failure and alerted us and Oracle to dispatch a spare through ASR. In the cloud, it is even more transparent.
There are no issues at all except when the code we were working with was not scalable (procedural PL/SQL and cursors). In fact, the RAC worked very well and we saw near-linear scale-up, and the license costs were dramatically less than a conventional solution. We were also able to consolidate hundreds of databases on a single Exadata rack.
Customer Service:
We have had great customer service. We had almost no issues with the machine as such except for some predictive hard disk failures and the machine never had a problem due to the redundancy, so there was zero downtime for any of the hard disk faults.
Technical Support:
Majority of the cases we have had good support. We had a few small hiccups with ASR Auto Update as it twice lost configuration. However, we have since disabled that function and do the ASR updating manually after taking a backup. As this feature is not essential to the actual running of the machine, it never caused us any major issues.
Positive
We have been running and recommending Exadata since version 1 for our customers. For Oracle databases, there is no better solution.
It was a vendor team who did the bare-bones setup and then we did the actual deployment and migrations in-house. Our team is very seasoned. The vendor team was quite good and we had no issues with installation and initial configuration.
As we have the capability and specialization to do the software implementation in-house we worked collaboratively with the vendor team for the same. The vendor team was very knowledgeable.
We have realized a lot of tangible and intangible benefits from the machine. It would be difficult to put a dollar figure to it because the machine allows for things that simply cannot be done without it. So in that way, we can safely say that the machine paid for itself within the first 12 months.
There are many new options available now, including Exadata Cloud @ customer or ExaCS. I would advise others to engage a third-party expert to ensure that they get the best deal. I did note that Oracle does tend to internally oversize things especially if they want to fill up a budget, and hence third-party oversight is essential.
For us, we work with all vendors and every vendor has its good and bad qualities. We use all solutions and hence we know when to recommend the Exadata machine.
I would always consider this solution when I want an integrated scalable best-of-breed solution for enterprise-class Oracle database deployment. I have seen so much inter-vendor finger-pointing during SevOne outages to ever want to wander back into that uncharted wilderness.
Primarily OLTP but report is done against a combination of Materialized Views and transactional tables.
We have a number of statistics collected before cutover on our legacy environment compared to Exadata. Without doing anything other than copying the data across, we saw significant performance gains for most key processes. We receive feedback from users stating how fast the performance is compared to other systems. Performance issues are few and far between. Our database environment is extremely stable compared to the legacy DB configuration. We upgraded from a X2-2 quarter rack to a X5-2 eighth rack and experienced significant performance gains. We recently performed another technology refresh to a X7-2 so obviously, we've been very pleased with the initial investment. For this deployment, we decided to virtualize the Exadata configuration, providing some additional flexibility to our operational environment.
We primarily run OLTP with some reporting. With that being said, the feature that provides us the most performance gains is the Smart Flash Cache for the OLTP databases. The "offloading" capabilities provide the biggest performance gains for Reporting such as smart scans and storage indexes. There is a new security feature which allows disabling ssh to the storage servers which will make my security folks very happy. Also, there is a STIG script for hardening storage servers and Database Nodes which can be implemented as a report only or actually implement security settings. Would advise running report first to assess the results and then manually modify, as needed.
My biggest gripe has been patches which has dramatically improved since our initial Exadata was delivered (January 2011). The only issues we periodically experience are with non-default RPMs on the database nodes. These may fail during the pre-req check which means opening a SR with support. This has become the exception, not the norm so overall not much to complain about. The X2-2 used to experience frequent disk failures but now, that is a thing of the past.
ten years
There is redundancy built throughout the Exadata so even when we've experienced a disk failure, it's a very low stress situation. Early on we had some performance issues with DBFS and a node eviction problem. DBFS was resolved through a combination of settings changes and a quarterly patch. The node eviction was resolved through a one-off patch that eventually got rolled into a quarterly patch. I would chalk up these issues to being early adopters. We do have an occasional bug but I can't think of any that would be unique to Exadata with the database software. At least this provides some degree of comfort that Exadata is not the source of the issue.
The key for scalability is selecting the appropriate disk configuration and the proper size rack configuration. The two options are High Capacity and High Performance. If ever in doubt, always go with High Capacity. The performance difference is negligible at best, however having the extra space allows for more consolidation. That's the entire point of Exadata, to consolidate databases. We've added a few databases to the Exadata since we originally started to use the environment and there has been no performance impact. In our case, a Quarter rack was appropriate but for larger environments, this may not be enough.
Customer Service:
In terms of overall Oracle customer service, we've had good experiences on this front. Oracle has provided us access to their experts and continually check to see how things are going. Whenever an issue comes up, they treat the problem seriously. Since we support a government customer, Oracle is extra motivated to ensuring we have a successful experience. Since 2011, there have been significant improvements with support. Occasionally we do hit issues which it seemingly takes support a longer period of time to provide a patch or workaround but these namely involve additional features, not core technology so it's a matter of exhibiting patience.
Technical Support:
On the hardware side, customer service is quite good. Any disk failures get replaced in a day and with triple redundancy for disk, it's not been a concern. Software customer service has improved over the years. Early on was a little rough as I will say the software wasn't fully mature. As the product has matured, so has the software support's capability to resolve issues more quickly. We can't take advantage of ASR, however this seems like a major improvement for customer service in terms of responsiveness.
We didn't switch, we were doing a technology refresh and went with Exadata instead of building out our own Oracle RAC configuration. We previously had a combination of Dell servers, Red Had Linux OS, Oracle Cluster File System on EMC Storage with Juniper switches. This configuration had lots of performance issues, node evictions, and constant headaches. Since moving to Exadata, all those pain points went away.
There is a definite learning curve initially. We had to learn about migration options, shared mount point options, how to integrate with Cloud Control, patching, health check, how to optimize, and how to harden the Exadata environment. Since we went live, many more folks use Exadata so there's more how to's and best practice documents available so the learning curve isn't nearly as steep. We learned a lot in the process and now have a tremendous amount of expertise in setting up, configuring, optimizing and maintaining the Exadata.
We implement Exadata in-house and have gone through several migration methodologies.
We had ACS perform the initial Startup Pack, however there are companies that can do this much cheaper to lower the original setup cost, such as ours. Day-to-day cost is greatly reduced compared to our legacy environment as we no longer have to serve as "fire fighters." In terms of pricing, Exadata is probably not going to be the lowest cost option. There is a price to pay for performance and stability. With that being said, I have not heard of any customers who have regretted the purchase and/or looking to get off the technology. On the contrary, I can't imagine going to another solution at this point and trying to justify this with the user community in terms of why the system performance degraded. Can't imagine that would go over too well.
We had a custom solution and evaluated Exadata versus the custom solution. Exadata was actually a cheaper solution due to the number of cores. Oracle software licenses are based on processor so if comparing a Quarter Rack versus a 4+ four node custom solution, Exadata may win out from this perspective. We were looking at a 5 node RAC which would have doubled the cost of our software licenses when compared to the equivalent with a Quarter rack of Exadata. Besides, the performance metrics indicated Exadata would easily outperform the custom solution which made our decision a no brainer.
Exadata is a powerful solution. As I mentioned there is a learning curve. Working with a company that has experience with Exadata can help avoid potential pain points and maximize the ROI.
