Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

FlexPod XCS vs Oracle Exalogic [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

FlexPod XCS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (2nd)
Oracle Exalogic [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy IT Manager at MBBank
Enforces standardized setup procedures following Certified Validated Design (CVD) guidelines and offers greater flexibility and control over the system compared to traditional systems
The GUI setup follows the right setup, meaning we have to follow the CVDi.e. Certified Validated Design. Everything is clear, because you can build CI yourself, but without rules, it can be messy. With FlexPod, there are rules to follow, making it more standardized. This helps with troubleshooting and compatibility assessments, simplifying troubleshooting significantly. We also use FlexPod pre-validated architectures to validate the design. It is very, very important to us because we had a bad case in 2015 where separate items integrated poorly due to no version or firmware compatibility certification. Troubleshooting became a nightmare. So, standards are crucial for us, and everything entering production should be verified or at least documented for certification.
MK
AGM at Tech Valley Networks Limited
Good performance and stability with a straightforward setup
Typically, if a client needs support, they contact us and we are the ones to offer it to them. However, we have contacted Oracle technical support and we have a back-to-back contract with them. They support our HR on-site team. We also get support from Oracle functional services and backend support. They are usually quite good, but at times it depends on which engineer is working. When we get support from India, there's sometimes a delay. If it's from Europe or the US, often we get faster results. Time zones also affect technical support response times and will dictate who responds to our requests.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It runs very well lights out. Set it and forget it."
"This sounds dumb, but it just works. I don't want to have to deal with support, and I don't need to because, again, it has just worked."
"The consistent delivery that we receive from the products. We deliver it to different customers, and we know it will be a consistent end-to-end solution as well."
"The storage efficiency and performance are valuable."
"It is the overall collaboration between NetApp and Cisco to come up with a product that is best in class and best in breed. You are bringing together the best things about UCS and NetApp, as well as you are tying it together with the Nexus fabric."
"This solution has helped to make more things consistent within our organization."
"We found FlexPod to be innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking. We've taken advantage of their storage optimizations to obtain better use out of the space. We upgraded to All Flash FAS (AFF), which has provided a huge performance increase that we haven't barely scratched the surface of. We have plenty of overhead, so that's always nice when taking on tasks which might have otherwise taxed a smaller system."
"It took a server room where we had 280 servers and another with 180 and condensed them from 15 racks down to three racks. It's helping us in the data center with all our environmentals... In addition, we're getting the ability of VMware, which is virtualization, so now we have redundancy on all of our boxes, instead of them being physical."
"Exalogic offers integration with other engineered systems, which increases the throughput capability and enables processing of bigger and heavier workloads."
"The automation and provisioning of the environment, as well as the centralized monitoring, have all improved over the years."
"Scalablility: When we need to upgrade from an eighth-rack to a full-rack, the real downtime is less then an hour."
"The main benefit of using the solution is for the performance it provides."
"Enterprise high-speed interoperability: With IPoIB we can deliver to other environments, either IP-Ethernet-based or IP-InfiniBand-based protocol, both with minimum bandwidth capacity of 10Gbps, 20Gbps, or 40Gbps, redundantly."
"Server consolidation. In a cloud architecture, moving the HA VM from one to other is faster. This is because of the InfiniBand network fabric between the compute nodes and storage nodes (ZFS Storage)."
"Provides high-speed network, strong storage features (ZFS), High Availability out of the box, and is Integrated with a large number of products."
 

Cons

"You must build each block separately, that's a disadvantage sometimes."
"Mainly, the interface needs improvement. I'm not a big fan of UCS Manager, sometimes. I believe they released the new one, and it seems like in every version something changes and something else doesn't work. When they switched to HTML5, I believe we had issues in version 3.2. They fixed it in the next version. The amount of work to upgrade a system for change control is tedious to have issues every time. I would recommend more regression testing, then testing the different browsers in that."
"I think they are working on it, but I would like to be able to log into a portal and see the end-to-end solution and understand where it stands, from a supportability perspective."
"Hardware stability needs improvement. We replaced a lot of RAM this past year. We had to replace the complete blade once after extensive troubleshooting. Any given time, we have approximately one blade down within the entire infrastructure, unfortunately."
"The last two calls that I have made to NetApp support have been handled too casually. People are too lax, not quite as professional as I would have liked."
"There could be room for improvement in terms of offering more flexibility in CBD options."
"For the next release, because I know that we are using Pure Storage, what I want to see is the GUI interfaces on this UCS monitor."
"The cost may be high compared to other solutions."
"The solution needs to add a network virtualization feature similar to that of VxRail. If they could implement that, it would be great for the product."
"The solution is prone to disk failures. This needs to improve. Over the past four years we've had to replace about six of them. They've failed almost every three to six months."
"Middleware application services, such as statistics, data mining, could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has saved us hundreds of man-hours by using this converged infrastructure."
"Anytime that you are buying any storage make sure you understand storage. Do not just buy storage based on what somebody sells you in terms of IO or throughput."
"We have saved time and money for new service deployments. Without FlexPod, it probably takes about ten hours. With FlexPod, within two hours, we are up and running. So, we have seen about an 80 percent time decrease."
"As a whole, it is inexpensive, and it uses the least amount of parts."
"It's expensive, but when you pay for enterprise support and enterprise products, you have to pay the big bucks."
"If your company really needs to be up 100% of the time, and you need to do a private data center, I don't know if I could realistically actually recommend another blueprint."
"Sometimes you may end up spending a little more to get it in the first place, but you gain it back in terms of infrastructure upgrade costs and troubleshooting costs. The solution also lasts a surprisingly long time."
"Buy storage based on the solutions you need, the technologies you need, and what will make your life a lot easier down the road."
"To expand the hardware's capability requires a massive investment."
"Get the price of the license you will need for the middleware that will be running on top of the Exalogic. Otherwise, you can use another middleware solution, as long as it can run on top of Oracle Linux."
"Pricing and licensing are two very delicate aspects when talking about Oracle, especially engineered systems. The prices are quite high compared with other similar products, so the CapEx analysis and investment return have to be very well studied."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Converged Infrastructure solutions are best for your needs.
884,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Performing Arts
6%
Educational Organization
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise14
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
Sascar, Banca Transilvania, UL, Agilent, Reliance Commercial Finance, PT Bank Central Asia Tbk, Bank of Qingdao, Yarra Valley Water, FAW Car Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure. Updated: February 2026.
884,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.