Oracle Database Appliance Reviews

Valuable features include an easy installation, good performance, and stability.

The physical installation is easy. They have single mode and high availability, depending on the budget. It has all-in-one features in it.

I would like to see some improvement in the capacity.

We have been supporting this solution for customers for three years. We are an Oracle gold partner company.

It is stable and there have not been any crashes.

Everybody can use it. It is scalable.

We opened a support ticket for the installation.

We have a customer who is using IBM or HPE. They are going to buy an Oracle database appliance for the scalability, installation, performance, and high available options. I think this is the reason they want to switch now. Scalability, high availability, easy installation, and good performance are the reasons to switch.

You can install all of your visual information on the Oracle database appliance. All of your software is on this virtual machine. Another option is to install your database on an older Oracle database appliance, which is recommended and has the best performance.

I don't know anything about license or prices.

Actually, we always focus on the Oracle products because we are Oracle partners. We didn't compare anything else. Based on the budget, Exadata systems are now in the new Oracle database appliances. There are three options: small, medium, and high availability. It depends on the customer's budget.

The physical installation is easy. They have single mode and high available mode options, depending on the budget. So it has all-in-one features in it.

It has an easy installation, good performance, and it is stable.

ODA has two most valuable features. First, it’s very easy to deploy. Once received, you can unpack it, rack it, install it in less than one day and having a fully usable machine very quickly.

The second feature is its scalability: you can start with a small configuration (regarding Oracle licensing) and then enable Oracle CPU depending on your needs.

Not my organization because I work as a consultant. But one of my customers who has bought an ODA started a database for 10 shops and then he grew the number of CPUs enabled each time he opened some new shops.

Only one time during an upgrade, because the customer made some modifications in the machine configuration and he forgot that ODA is an appliance, not a traditional platform. So you have to be careful when you want to modify the system. A better way to do it is to ask support, when in doubt.

Usually my customers switched to ODA because they didn’t have a full-time DBA in their organization, and they wanted an easy to use solution that can be installed and upgraded easily.

The initial setup is very straightforward. As said above, you can deploy the machine in less that one day. But, as it’s an appliance, if you are not very familiar with this kind of deployment, read the docs and ask support first.

Usually, the customers I work for who chose ODA have licensed their database with the enterprise edition and they usually buy the diagnostic pack and deploy an enterprise manager cloud control to easily administer their OD platform.

The Oracle Database Appliance offers a pay-as-you grow model for Oracle licenses. This model allows you to only license the CPU count that you need, rather than the entire capacity. When virtualized, this is supported for both the database and the application tier.

The solution has good stability and it is easy to work with. We quickly deployed both database and application workloads in a single appliance on a virtualized platform, based on Oracle VM

Customers cannot cluster multiple appliances together to create a larger cluster (beyond two servers), nor can they expand the internal disk storage of the system beyond two storage trays. This area can be improved.

I have used this solution for two years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I would rate the level of technical support 8/10.

I previously used Fresh Install.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

The pricing and licensing is worth it.

I did not really evaluate other options before choosing.

In my opinion, if your organization is constantly evolving and looking for less infrastructure support/planning for virtualization, then this solution is a one-stop-shop and a nice product. If you are a mid-pace organization and can handle regular databases or Exacta, then you can skip this step.

We value the following features:

• It is easily scalable.
• All patches (OS, DB) are bundled by Oracle, so patching dependencies are resolved.
• Oracle guarantees that the setup works if you keep up with the patches.

Setup of the server and database was easy. At a later point in time we decided to virtualize it, and the basic setup of the box was also quite easy.

The following issues need some attention:

• There is no option to combine a second ODA X2 in real application cluster mode. Therefore high availability is limited to same-cabinet RAC, and to offsite standby.
• Storage expansion was not possible for ODA X2 so we frequently ran into storage limitations.
• Even in an RAC setup it is not easy to avoid downtime because OS patching requires both nodes to be patched with very short overlapping.
• Apparently there is a way to avoid downtime, but we did not explore that option anymore because we added a remote standby.

We used the solution from 2012 to 2016.

We had some stability issues.

In the beginning, soon after initial setup and go-live, a bug caused one of the nodes to use all cores while on the other node only the requested cores where activated. This led to instability.

Also, later a hard disk caused instability while it was "dying".

We had an issue with scalability, but only in terms of storage.

Technical support was excellent.

We didn't use a previous solution. This solution was recommended by a consulting company because of ease of scalability and patching.

Initial setup was easy.

Pricing was reasonable given the high quality hardware parts used and the high availability.

I was not involved in evaluation of alternative solutions.

The ODA is a great server solution for mid-size companies but be aware of the limitations when it comes to real application cluster.

Also, make sure the solution provides enough disk storage for the life time of the product.

The most valuable feature is the ability to use it as a virtualization platform. This is great because you can run the Oracle Database layer as ODA_BASE domain and use Oracle VM templates to build Oracle applications as VMs so you can also have the application layer in the same platform.

It is easy in terms of management of virtual infrastructure. With "oakcli" is the all-in-one CLI to manipulate the virtual environment of the ODA.

It had a lot of bugs, especially with the old patch bundles. There was no support for connecting it to an FC tape drive for backups.

The ODA X3-2 has been up and running since August 2013. This was the first model of the appliance.

We had issues with the virtual infrastructure. Sometimes the shared repositories go into status Unknown, VMs crashing etc. Also the automatic failover of the VMs sometimes failed.

We had no issues with scalability. It allows only two disk enclosures for storage space, and for servers you can upgrade the RAM.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10.

Our previous solutions were building a high availability environment for Oracle Database with blocks, server storage OS, network configuration, etc.

The setup was very easy. It is great to have a fully configured and tested HA environment for Oracle Database in two days. All the built-in automation scripts do it for you.

If you compare the pricing of ODA vs traditional architecture it can be a bit high but you get more value by minimizing the risk, a short implementation time, and all-in-one patching.

There are no solutions like ODA.

Overall it is a great product for consolidating Oracle Databases.

With the newer models there are a lot of optimizations both in hardware and software. For example the cluster interconnect card went from 10GbE in ODA X3-2 to InfiniBand QDR in ODA X5-2. The "oakcli" has added features with the new patch bundles.

We value the following features:

• Performance (we used a bare-metal configuration so I don't know about using it as a virtual environment).
• Easy management (it saves a lot of installation and patching time).

This box allowed me to consolidate the three most critical databases in one single reliable server (it is actually two nodes in our machine).

The following issues need attention:

• I would be happy to see the Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) pre-installed in it instead of installing it in a separate machine.
• The Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) is quite slow. Sometimes the page takes ages to open.
• The shutdown procedure in this box is different from many other servers that I worked with. For example, when you shut down the server, you see the LEDs of the storage part still on, and there is no button for that part to turn the power off. You can only unplug the power socket!

We have been using the solution for two years.

We didn't encounter any stability issues.

There was a little scalability issue. We noticed that the storage dedicated to the system in one node was less than the other. We therefore needed to expand it. We needed Oracle support to do that for us but it was online and streamlined.

The technical support is very good, but not excellent.

I didn't use a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward but we had issues that needed Oracle support to fix for us.

Frankly I have no clue about pricing. The organization didn't have any issue about paying for the licenses.

There is one thing that you need to be aware of. When you buy this box, you buy licenses for a specific number of CPU cores. When you set up the box, you define how many cores you want to enable. If the number of cores that you enable is different from the number of cores that you have in your license, it will be so hard to fix it (according to the Oracle representative claim but I am not sure about that.)

We evaluated RAC servers from other vendors.

The biggest disadvantage of this server is its availability when you patch the whole machine, i.e. when you patch the entire ODA firmware, not the databases within it. When you do this kind of patching, you must restart the entire server and plan for downtime.

This box has a network subnetting IP address pre-configured in it for internal communication between the nodes.

If your network has the same network subnetting IP address, you must change it in your network. This box (as of x4-2 and I don't know about the new models) doesn't allow you to change its internal subnetting IP address.

Configurable installation pre-defined templates are available to meet your requirements.

It has led to improved performance, it saves maintenance costs, increases stability and reliability and is a single vendor solution.

Creating a VM on ODA could be improved.

We have been using the solution for two years.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

I would rate the technical support as 8/10.

We were using IBM P series AIX, using ODA ease patching, installation and support.

The setup was straightforward, as install and reinstall is configurable with predefined templates.

I recommend to get a discounted deal from Oracle, especially with the one time setup which was free.

We didn't really evaluate any alternatives.

It is highly recommended in an environment where no Sys Admin, Infrastructure and Network Team exists. DBA can rack and stack with the easily performed installation.

The biggest value that customers are seeing, is that it's easy to install, quick to deploy, and easy to consolidate platforms; as opposed to building an environment from scratch. When you get the ODA, all you must do is plug it in and run several commands to get it up and running. This allows for the time to deploy to be really fast. With the addition of the X6-2S, 2M and 2HA, there is a ODA platform that will suit SMB, mid-size and now large scale customer workloads.

Particularly interesting, is that now ODA 2S/M supports Standard Edition (SE2) database configurations, which is great for SMB and mid-size consolidation plays.

Moreover, the ODA X2-HA adds a new whole area for us and our customers, as it adds an all flash storage array option and virtualization capabilities; further improving consolidation densities.

The platform is primarily used for departmental mid-size companies, although I do know large companies that use it, because it’s a great platform for consolidating. It is unable to expand by much, because of the way the ODA configures when you have two nodes and X number of storage. Oracle has done a good job of letting it expand storage, but the number of nodes is still limited to two. This continues to be an issue for customers.

I have worked with ODA for the last five to six years.

It’s a very stable product. As with any other technology, in initial phases, it needed to be tested; but it has become a very solid platform with a large customer base.

The initial idea, was that ODA would be a scalable solution; allowing customers tostart with a small number of CPU’s and grow as the demand increased. As aprimarily consolidation platform, you can consolidate more, by moving move up the CPU’s as needed; pricing goes along with that too.

It’s a very solid platform. Oracle has been good at managing the support.

ODA was initially designed for setup to be easy. Once brought in-house, you plug it in, set up your network connection, run one or two commands, and then set up is complete. Even if it's in a virtualized environment, it's still easy to set up. The quick setup is the beauty and the added value that ODA brings, as opposed to other conversion or engineering systems, which take a little bit more time.

Upgrades are the same; due to its automation, many of the commands, designed by the Oracle development team, allow for easy upgrades for the entire end-to-end stack.

It's a very low-cost, simplistic solution, especially from the infrastructure side. If you have minimal staff and a mid-size environment, this is a perfect platform.