Oracle Exadata Reviews

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.

We have implemented Oracle EBS on Exadata several times. We mostly used Exadata as the data layer. The most significant gain was in the area of performance. Performance increased significantly both for OLTP and batch works.

In addition to the performance increase, we saw a significant decrease in IT operations, because the necessity of SQL tunning is decreased, the total work that is spent on administration operations decreased, and so on.
Another significant gain was the efficiency of the administration. In Exadata environments, one database machine admin (or DBA team) could manage not only the database, but storage (cells) and the OS as well.

As the Exadata is hardened by Oracle and it is the most important one among the system in the engineered systems group of Oracle, we haven't seen any big Exadata specific problems that could not be solved, yet. The latest Exadata machine is generation 6 (X-6) so there is a current knowledge base.

• Backup/Restore performance: Fast backups, fast restores (especially useful for creating clone environments)
• Low Memory utilization on database nodes: The database performs less work, especially for I/O. This is due to the ability to offload processing from the database nodes (compute nodes) to the storage nodes (cells).
• Decrease in I/O (from the perspective of database nodes): thanks to smart scan, the amount of data transferred from storage to database nodes significantly decreases.
• High I/O performance: Due to Smart Scan, storage indexes and intelligent storage server nodes and storage server software(cells).
• Decrease in database size and decrease in I/O: Due to Exadata specific compression techniques, database size decreases. In addition, the amount of I/O that is done for querying the same amount of data is decreased, as well. (This one also increases performance of the queries.)
• Increase in redo write speed: Smart flash logs provide better LGWR performance, as LGWR writes redo data both flash and disk in parallel. It considers whichever of these writes completes first as done.
• Smart Flash Logs are a new feature that comes with 11.2.2.2.4 cell software. They are not for reading. They are used like a circular buffer for redo writes. Smart Flash Logs can enhance the performance of an OLTP database.
• Ability to prioritize I/O using IORM: IORM is used for managing the Storage I/O resources. We can manage our I/O resources based on the Categories, Databases and Consumer Groups. The hierarchy that we build, used to distribute I/O.
• IORM must be used on Exadata if you have a lot of databases running on an Exadata Machine. IORM is a friend of consolidation projects, in my opinion.
• Automatic SR creation using ASR: Decreases management costs. Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) is a secure, scalable, customer-installable software feature of warranty and Oracle Support Services that provides auto-case generation when common hardware component faults occur. ASR manager can be installed on an external Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris server. Also, you can use one of the Exadata database nodes for installing ASR manager (not preferred).
• Implementing QOS for CPU using Instance caging: Instance caging can be used to limit the CPU usage in the database level. It is a good thing for building consolidation environment. It can be configured for preventing the non production residing on the same Exadata database machine to allocate the resources excessively, leaving no space in CPU queues for the production environments.
• Fast support by Oracle: Maybe it is because it is an engineered system or maybe it is because of another reason, the quality and speed of Oracle support is very satisfactory.
• Single vendor support: Software and hardware support by Oracle.
• High Availability: It is a Highly available database machine. It provides built-in high availability, at both software (for example: Oracle RAC) and hardware levels.
• Scalability: Exadata is a scale-out compute and storage platform.
• Ability to create tablespaces and datafiles very quickly.
• Offers a database environment built by Oracle: An Oracle database machine, that is built, optimized, certified and supported by the RDBMS vendor (Oracle). (Oracle RDBMS is the concern of this machine. Exadata is built for it.)
• InfiniBand network for RAC private interconnect: InfiniBand functionality. CPU cycles of the servers are not used for InfiniBand transport.

Product specific documentation is satisfactory, but the interoperability documents should be improved. For example, there should be a step-by-step installation document for installing EBS on Exadata. Similarly, the documentation should be revised and Exadata specific notes should be added where necessary. We saw this need while installing EBS 12.2 database tier on Exadata. The document was written for the subject “Installing EBS 12.2 on Linux X86-64 (Exadata fits this category)". However; the OS RPMs that the document instructs to install, were not not present even in the latest Exadata. However, as Oracle says, Exadata has all the RPMs and they are up-to-date, so we were confused. We created several SRs, and even today it is not certain. We installed the RPMs specified in the document into Exadata. This was okay, but they may not even be necessary at all.

Certification should also be improved. Today, Oracle doesn't certify applications with engineered systems. We just check the RDBMS and OS certification to decide whether our application's database is cerfied with Exadata. This is actually enough for most of the cases. However, certifying specific data layers of certain applications (like EBS's database tier) on Exadata and adding some notes and recommendations (especially for performance) and restrictions (where necessary) can be a good move.

I have used this since 2011.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues. Oracle Real Application Clusters on Extended Distance Clusters is not supported with Exadata. So, basically, it is not supported to build RAC extended clusters on multiple Exadata machines. The good news is that RAC extended clusters will probably be supported with Exadata in Oracle Database 12.2 (12CR2). It is not certain yet, but it is expected, so we will see.

Actually, a consulting company (Oracle Partner) giving the technical support of this product, we didn't encounter any problems by getting advanced support by Oracle and we didn't get any unrecoverable problems while implementing what we learnt from the user guides and Oracle support documents.
The technical support of Exadata is quite good (if it is given by the IT professionals who know what they are doing).

Our customers were using conventional converged infrastructures and standalone servers. The reason they switched can be explained with the following list of items:

• Exadata is optimized by Oracle for Oracle databases.
• All the costs, capabilities and expected results are actually already defined for Exadata. No big surprises.
• Single vendor support for the whole stack.
• Unique and innovative capabilities, such as Smart Scan, Exabus and HCC.

Setup is straightforward. You just fill out a deployment form that Oracle sends you. By filling out this deployment form, you actually give all the necessary inputs for the deployment (such as IP addresses, host names, NTP server IP addresses, DNS server names, etc.)

Most of the time, Oracle field engineers, who are well-trained for deploying Exadata, do the setup on-site. After the initial setup, any experienced admin who knows Oracle RAC and Oracle RDBMS, can go further to provision databases (create databases, do performance related configurations and so on) on Exadata or they can even further migrate databases to Exacta.

After the first setup, Oracle still answers your questions and supports you to make sure that deployment meets the customer requirements.

I recommend a proper sizing. A proper sizing makes you decide how big (1/8,1/4 etc) your Exadata should be. In the sizing phase, you can also decide whether to license all cores, or reduce the number cores using capacity-on-demand features of Exadata, as well. This has a direct impact on licensing.

In general, our customers are generally interested in Exadata. But, there are cases where the power of Exadata is just too much. Especially when the databases are not so big and when the transaction counts are low.

From an Oracle perspective, our customers also evaluate the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). The decision is made according to the needs. If ODA is not enough for the customer’s needs, they consider Exadata.

I recommend others to define their needs and the things they expect from Exadata. I strongly recommend doing a PoC to ensure that Exadata meets their expectations.

Of course, reviewing the Exadata related documents and real life stories will give a better idea about the tasks that are done for implementing an Exadata environment and the tasks that are done to get the most benefit from Exadata.

Workload offloading to the cell layer : Exadata is Oracle's engineered system which SW and HW are compatible and contains many layers (compute nodes – networking – storage or cells), so compute nodes receives request or transactions then offload their processing to the cell through InfiniBand switches and this storage or cells contains high speed flash memory and Exadata driver software that has many features that provide high performance.

High availability of each component and everything is redundant: as I mentioned before Exadata conations many layers each one of them is redundant for example at least there are two clustered compute nodes contains databases homes, instances, binaries...etc. these clustered nodes are active/active, so if one of the go down the work will continue so this is High availability and redundancy for compute nodes layer, this similar to InfiniBand Switches and storage failure groups.

Smart scan feature and the flash memory: it is part of Exadata driver software which is preinstalled on cells storage which provides the compute node with the required selected data or rows only not the whole tables as normal ASM, so filtering is done at the level cell by using the flash memory.

• Exadata accelerates the performance to whole applications in the environment at least by 2-3x times than the old hardware.
• One consolidated environment for all Oracle databases.

• The integration between Exadata and Enterprise Cloud Manager should be included out of the box by default and should be agent-less, just discovery only; or, add an embedded and dedicated monitoring and management UBI tool for all HW and SW of Exadata.
• Enhance the monitoring and alerts part related to Exadata with EM.
• All firmware, OS, cells SW, etc. (quarterly patching for Exadata) upgrade and patching should be easily done through EM.
• Physical KVM is required, as in the old version; Cisco management switch is the only single point of failure.

I have used it for three years.

Some steps failed during the deployment by using one command utility to do all deployment steps by one command; so, we divided the deployment steps, then solved each issue separately until we successfully finished the development.

We have not encountered any stability issues; it is a stable box.

Until now, we did not scale.

Customer service is 7/10.

Technical support is 6/10.

We previously used normal HW, then moved to VMware, then moved to Exadata to get good performance and consolidated platform for DBs.

The initial setup is clear but you have to be careful while filling out the OEDA (Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant) tool as it will generate an XML file that contains all of the required configurations for everything, like networks, storage, clusters, etc.. This file will be used during the initial setup.

We implemented it through the vendor; I rate their level of expertise about 7/10.

At first glance, it is expensive because it contains many HW and SW components and provides high availability, as you have to buy licenses for DB, RAC, packs, and Exadata drivers SW per disk. But, if you are going to use it in a consolidated way for all Oracle databases, I think the price will be reasonable, as you have many DBs. There are many sizes for Exadata, so you have to choose the suitable one for your organization according to proper sizing. For licensing, the minimum license number is 8 cores, which are available for Exadata X5-2 and X6-2.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated HPE HW including flash memory and SSD disks, but it was more expensive at that time.

The team should be familiar with RAC; some HW and network knowledge. The team should understand the new Exadata SW related to the cell layer.

Consider the COD feature to pay as you go. Integrating Exadata with Oracle Cloud Enterprise Manager gives you the power of monitoring and managing the box. You can also enable the notification mailer through EM or cell.

Performance with use of storage compute.

Single appliance with no additional tooling required for deployment reduces overall maintenance and cost of ownership.

Cost, need for additional licenses for core Oracle products.

Two years.

Yes, Cisco switch is not a standard within our company. Need to deploy with Oracle switch, after initial validation and setup, un-plug all network, replace the Cisco switch, and recable. This is time consuming and should not be required if Oracle would simply put in a different Cisco switch.

No.

Yes, memory limitations, 756gb limits the performance of databases.

Platinum support services supplied with the Exadata is worthless.

If I have an application down, we do not call oracle support as their response times to get a qualified engineer on the phone take 4+ hours. We solve problems ourselves.

ODA and standalone.

Scalability and consolidation.

See the switch issue mentioned above.

Implemented in-house with the assistance of Technologent.

Negative.

Total ROI should include the HW and all the associated SW licenses required. With an EXA, the cost to implement is prohibitive when also performing replication as you have to procure two of these very expensive boxes.

ODAs.

I like mainly the performance. Also, we have enabled RAC clusters. That's one of the main things, as well as high availability. The performance and high availability are really awesome.

The main benefit is that everything is powered by Oracle; the whole box, hardware, software, and storage. So we have the flexibility of going to one vendor directly instead of going to multiple vendors if we had any issues. If we have a storage issue, we go to them. If we have a database issue, we go to them. And if there are any patches or other updates, everything is combined as a single patch. We can apply it and it's easy to apply with a single command and easy to coordinate and support.

In the current version we're using, we had lots of storage issues, disk failures, etc. We think in the future, we'd like to see that reduced. That will reduce the cost and everything for the client.

It is stable.

We had an issue where we had to increase the storage and we got the new cells from Oracle. Then we scaled outward.

We have used technical support many times. Most of time it's okay, but sometimes there's a delay in the response. Then we have to escalate and get it done.

We didn’t have any previous solution. We had different vendors, like a storage vendor, and the DB software was from Oracle. As a security company, we want to maintain our compliance by applying the latest patches. That's why we chose this engineered system: so that we have a single vendor we can contact easily.

For setup, we had a consultant come in. They trained us initially and helped us with the set up. Then, after that, we started working on everything.

It's very costly.

I would suggest going with the product, but again it depends on the application, the budgeting and all that. The budget for the application depends on how critical the application is. If it's really critical and revenue generating, then I'll recommend going with this product. But if it is not so critical, then I'll recommend going with something is less costly.

Mainly, we already had experience with the Oracle database and that's why we chose this one.

Technical support is one of the things we look for in a vendor, because any issue we get we want to get a response as soon as possible. We also consider the stability of the product.

Exadata has been very great for us in terms of database consolidation. We have been using Exadata because we have been upgrading our technology every single year. In the past, we were using a Sun server and managing that as an active-passive cluster.

There have been initiatives to convert the databases to Oracle RAC; so when Exadata came out, they didn't really have to do much of anything. The grid infrastructure and everything came built in with all the best practices.

One of the advantages we found was that we didn't really need to be the first ones to be hit by a bug. If any of our customers comes across a bug, we already had a patch ready for it.

We have the platinum service for the database. That comes in handy in terms of high availability.

With all of this, the storage and the compute nodes were built together so they have more knowledge of Oracle-related queries: whether it is a redo or an IO; or it's coming from an undo space or from a DML. All these kinds of things come in really handy for us in terms of making our database perform really well.

These are some of the advantages I think we got out of Exadata.

The high availability of the database improved a lot. Our customers who are using it seem to be very happy with the response times. We also have a hot standby in case you need to migrate or do an upgrade. Overall, the company itself was very happy after migrating to Exadata.

The mix and match of hardware is always a problem. If you start with a product here and you want to migrate it two years later, you don't get the same version of the hardware. It's always different when you mix and match hardware. For example, if one compute node is X3-2, another two compute nodes are X5-2, and the storage node is different, I think it's going to get complicated. I don't know how to resolve it.

It would be nice if there was a way that you could swap everything over to upgrade all the hardware to one piece where it matches everything, and have an automatic hardware upgrade available. This way, you could keep everything on the same hardware solution. I don't know if that is possible.

Their support needs improvement. Also, the model in which they operate with a complex architecture in terms of upgrading the hardware pieces and expansion of RACs. Even the storage is licensed, which is a bigger question mark.

Any mission can go wrong. Exadata is no exception to this. Of course, we had software bugs; it's Oracle. You can expect a lot of back and forth with the new versions of it. We had lots of stability issues in the beginning. One of the major issues was the Write Back Flash Cache. By default, the storage nodes come with write-through. That's not very good for your OLE DB because it's not going to hit your flash. It's going to directly hit your hard disk. That's not going to give you good performance. The implementation team did not do a good job knowing that it's an OLE DB. They did not enable the Write Back Flash Cache.

The first few databases that we migrated went really well; but when we migrated more databases, it started failing. We had a big problem. We had to enable the Write Back Flash Cache to restabilize it.

Of course, the storage nodes have multiple bugs in them. Constantly upgrading it is a pain because while we do have high availability, not all the patches are done in a rolling fashion. Some of them force you to do non-rolling patches, specifically the OJVM patches.

Those are some of the pain points that I can see with Exadata.

So far, we don't have a big problem with scaling because we are happy with two node clusters. When we really need to expand, then we will need to cross that bridge when we come to it.

It's always a pain working with the Oracle support team. I say this because not all tickets get resolved immediately. It can take many days. Sometimes it takes a week. This can also include the weekend. During the weekend, the support team is thin. I need to follow up many times and call their managers. We have to scream at them to get back to us.

It's always a little bit difficult dealing with Oracle support compared to other vendors. They are a bigger organization. It does become a little complicated with such a big organization. With other vendors, you can call and resolve things properly and easily. I think there are a lot of process-oriented delays when it comes to Oracle. That’s built in as part of dealing with a bigger organization.

Because the ticket is not handled by a single engineer, sometimes the other engineer needs to digest it first. For example, a person in the US could start to help us, and then hand it over to someone in the UK. When that persons gets on board, he takes some time to digest the previous engineer’s explanation, recommendations, and diagnosis of the problem. If it continues to be handed over, and if it goes on for days, each engineer needs to go through the entire history of the ticket. That is a pain.

In such cases, it is always better to stick with a particular engineer and to a certain time zone. This means that the solution will be delayed. It depends on how soon you want to get it resolved. You might want your account manager to put pressure on the support team.

I am hoping for smoother operations and coordination in the future.

The initial setup depends on the technical team. The ACS team at Oracle can help, but it depends on which engineer you get on board. If the engineer is new on the team, doesn’t completely understand it, and is simply following instructions according to a script, there is every possibility that it could go wrong, if we don’t have a core team at our end verifying each step.

It is very important that you be prepared, and that you know every single change that goes into it end-to-end, including the monitoring and enabling the ASR service if you are going to use the platinum service.

A combination of pure flash storage and T4-4 servers are also extremely good in terms of latency times. It matches your TPS (transactions per second). Oracle had a little bit of an edge in terms of the best practices. Also, it's easier to debug and give us a solution because they can replicate the same issue in their environment. These are some of the slight advantages that Oracle Exadata has in terms of providing a solution more efficiently and quickly.

We always believed that Oracle is a leader in improving technology. We always believe in their solutions. Oracle Exadata is a great product without a doubt. Our gut now says why not go like we wanted and migrate to Oracle RAC. We didn’t want to spend time to put everything together, the network, the storage, and so on. Why reinvent the wheel when every best practice is already there? The "gotcha" is that if you increase the number of cores, you must be prepared to pay for the license.

Those are things that we weren't initially aware of, but then it all came handy to us when we need to go with engineered systems. That's why our upgrade part on our infrastructure upgrade and Oracle engineered system are on the same plane, so we just used it.

Exadata is not for everybody. Initially, it was designed for data warehousing. It's not for OLTP data. They improved it to OLTP, and then you could consolidate and mix and match. For all the patches, be aware whether you really want to go with it and expand it. Use all due diligence in checking whether this engineered system is the right solution for you . You need to work with it and test it yourself to make sure that it is for you. There might be a better product for you other than Exadata.

If you do want to go with Exadata, you should consult with someone outside of Oracle to help you and verify whether this is a good solution for you. Do not decide based on marketing material or gimmicks.

It's about consolidation of my infrastructure, scalability, high performance, and availability. These are the main factors that led me to choose this solution, as well as the cost. Exadata saves on my storage costs. All our costs were reduced significantly, and that was the reason why we went back to Exadata.

On the improvement side, they’re pretty much good. With the latest version, X6-2, we have enhanced the storage capacity. It was 4 TB each disk, now it’s 8 TB each disk; essentially same size appliance with more storage space. That request has been heard and we're able to mitigate that. Increased storage was one thing and they have definitely done better on the IO of flash storage. They implemented that; pretty much good stuff.

We have not had any major problems with stability.

From time to time, we scale capacity up and out. In system engineering terms, we can scale up to limit. The kind of features we just set it up, I've been able to fit my requirements into that.

We have Oracle’s Platinum support, which has been pretty good. However, the people are not always knowledgeable. I always rely on my best contacts in Oracle to get the right support. Even though we have Platinum Support, my last delay was my contacts in Oracle.

Initial setup was very much straightforward. Not as much manpower is required as we used to need. Before, if you wanted to manage a server, you had to have a server administrator, the storage administrator, and a DBA administrator. Now all three functions are combined into one person. A data administrator can perform the role of storage administrator, your host administrator, platform administrator, as well as database administrator. It's like several persons reduced to one.

I would definitely recommend this product if cost is not a factor. The implementation costs are, frankly, higher, but your return on investment over a period of time is less. If you're looking for that, then I would definitely advise to go for this product.

For me, the most valuable feature is the fact that it’s an integrated system of software and hardware together.

We see cost saving due to the reduced footprint in the data center and improved performance.

There has been great improvement from the X2 to the X6 versions. There is a lot of improvement every time. CPU power is always doubled every time and memory power is doubled, so they are on the right track.

Monitoring might be a good option for improvement.

The solution is very stable.

We have had no issues with scalability.

We have opened tickets with Oracle technical support and so far, no problems.

We looked at a custom-built solution.

Engage me.