Oracle Exadata Reviews

• 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.

We sell hyper-converged infrastructure tools including Oracle Exadata to enterprise customers such as governments. These are large projects that handle big data and typically run into the range of several million dollars, and in 2016, we had our first big Exadata project which involved implementing two superclusters with Exadata and Exalogic together. 

In some processes, we use converged infrastructure tools, but it's far more common nowadays to go with hyper-converged infrastructure tools. On our side, we prefer hyper-converged infrastructure because there just aren't that many people using the standard convergence model anymore. We're changing our processes to work exclusively with hyper-convergence and other technologies that complement hyper-convergence.

We use Exadata and Exadata Cloud at customer sites, and the main project that we're involved in now is hyper-converged Oracle environments with Exadata. I'm studying how to best apply the hyper-convergence model in Oracle to change Exadata to VxRail. But my forecast going forward is that we will be using fifty percent hyper-converged tools with Dell VxRail, and fifty percent with Oracle Exadata.

With Oracle Exadata, the change from on-premise to cloud is becoming a reality. With this, it becomes better and easier for us to make renovations and maintain our projects. We earn money with renovations on cloud, but when it comes to on-prem, we don't earn much when the customer needs renovations and support.

Regarding features, there are so many that we can offer to customers. When we sell Exadata Cloud, there are many options to choose from, especially when it comes to enterprise database options. In my experience, the main features that are appreciated are various ones like GPS and the assortment of security options.

There is one aspect to Exadata that I dislike, and that's the inconsistency with other databases. When you try to get Exadata to function with another type of database like SQL, or others, there should be reliable and consistent operation. When this is improved on, we should start to see more applications growing the market.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for six years, more or less.

Stability is very good. Especially if you maintain it and always update, you won't have any problems with stability. Once Exadata is established, it's 100%.

My one customer was using the Exadata version from 2013 which was extremely outdated, and when they changed to the updated version of the main system application it was very healthy for the customer's company. 

I think the scalability is good, but it can be even better. With the newer editions of Exadata, they are changing some features to meet the needs of growth and scalability, like access to additional disks in the storage environment, and they've upped the memory, too. But I don't think it was central, or essential, to the Exadata offering at first.

Nowadays, it's easier. In the first years of implementation of Exadata it was a bit more difficult, but now it's easier. If you have a team that knows Exadata well, and knows the limits of Exadata, then the setup and implementation is easy. If, on the other hand, you don't have an experienced team, then it's really difficult.

The last implementation we deployed took about two weeks, more or less.

The majority of our customers are in government or big enterprises, and the projects that we sell come out to several million USD. With this amount of money on the table, it's always better to have an experienced team of consultants, who know Exadata very well, handle the implementation.

If you're interested in going with Exadata, then I highly recommend looking for an experienced consulting firm that has completed at least one large implementation before, because it isn't something you want to put in the hands of unskilled consultants. And don't forget to be careful with your implementation when it comes to GDPR in Europe.

I would rate Oracle Exadata a nine out of ten.

My primary job on Exadata is working with the Oracle engineer whenever a customer makes a patching request. We engage with the Oracle engineer regarding Exadata patching in a quarterly manner, around every three months. I collaborate and communicate with our customers daily regarding these activities on Exadata.

On our customer side, we deploy Exadata X7 and Exadata X5. We work on our customer's side with Exadata patching on Exa 5 and Exa 7, and with an Oracle Enterprise Manager regarding monitoring purposes.

Their monitoring tool is available in the Exadata environment where you can easily monitor all things in the Exa tech support and if there is any issue present in Exa, you can easily fix it.

We are willing to migrate our customers to Exadata X8 since this is a new version of Oracle Exadata.

Their Smart Scan is a very capable feature with a great data retrieval rate.

It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for one and a half years.

Exadata is also a very stable environment. Their Smart Scan feature is great for every banking environment and financial institutions willing to implement it. 

It is a very scalable environment.

Our customers are very satisfied regarding Exadata because when we raise a call with Oracle regarding any issue their response is very prompt, within 5 minutes. And an engineer is available for working on the issue.

The initial setup was very easy and took two to four hours working on it because this is an engineer system. So the Oracle engineer and the ACS team worked on it and on the on-premises database to migrate to Oracle Exadata.

In our current situation it is not bad, it's a very capable and very comprehensive solution.

On a scale of one to ten I rate Exadata a ten!

The fact that we can consolidate all our databases into a single box is a cool feature. The extreme performance of Exadata is something that was worth paying for. Exadata performs at least 5-10 times faster than databases on conventional storage.

Previously, we were always facing performance related issues for the hundreds of internal applications running on our databases. That part has reduced quite dramatically. Seldom, if ever, do we encounter performance bottlenecks.

We did not see the volume of compression claimed by Oracle (10x-50x) on a table that had completely unique data. The table itself was about 140 GBs in size and we hardly got a compression of around 10%. We had elaborate discussions with Oracle about this, but we were not entirely convinced by the explanations provided by Oracle. This is something that needs to be looked into.

We have been using this product since December of 2013.

We did not encounter any issues of stability on Exadata.

There were no problems with scalability at all.

I would rate technical support as very good. We always received excellent technical support whenever we required it.

We were using an HPE solution, but as we were outgrowing our storage requirements, we explored other alternatives. Exadata seemed a very logical choice for consolidating all our databases in one place.

The setup was straightforward as Oracle was involved in the setup from the very outset. We did not face any issues during the setup.

My advice would be to have a licensing expert with you to study and analyze the licensing policy before you commit to the investment. There are a whole lot of technicalities in the fine print that may not always be apparent to the non-initiated.

We evaluated EMC Storage and Greenplum.

My advice would be to go with Exadata. It is definitely worth the investment.

Offloading is the most valuable feature of Exadata.

It integrates well with our other products.

• Conservation
• Performance

There are little things that need fine tuning, such as storage.

It’s also missing some features that you would expect from a data warehousing tool, such as snapshots.

It is stable.

It scales well for our needs.

Technical support is good.

We also looked at Teradata, but Exadata is perfect.

Definitely take some courses on Clusterware, ASM, Real Application Clusters; those kinds of courses, advanced courses.

The best features are its robustness, stability, and performance.

Actually, I'm using the old version. The latest version is already out with all a lot of new features; so what I’m looking for is already there in that. Once we start using the new one, then we can come to know what additions we can put in.

It seems very stable.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is awesome. Oracle is our technical support; so when we need it, they are there.

Initial setup is complex. You need Oracle technical support to do your initial setup.

I would certainly say if you're looking for something scalable or diverse, this is the solution.

The most valuable feature is supposed to be speed. I like the consolidation with the memory, the SSD and the InfiniBand, and the algorithms that they use internally to take different paths through for the database traffic. All of those features are why we went with it.

We've just started to convert over and the performance out of it was not as much as we had expected. We're seeing only, probably, one-third faster than where we were at. I don't know if we'll get the benefit that we had anticipated out of it.

I think their platinum support needs to be improved. It's very difficult after you've got the product in-house. They’ve got great service up until you get the product. Then, you get the product, and trying to find someone to help you with configuration or setup, or even just opening up an SR, was not there.

With patching, it takes 6-8 weeks to get it onto their schedule, in order to get something patched. Then, it's rush, rush, rush at the very end. It's a big mystery as to what exactly are they doing. That's the biggest problem that we've had.

We have not had any down time. We've run into bugs, which we had not anticipated. When we upgraded software, depending on the version, if you're not with the current patch release, you have huge problems. You can't even run. We can't even run our application right now because we ran into a patch problem.

For as far as we've gotten with it, it has scaled to our needs; so far so good.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. This was a CIO decision and we went with Exadata.

You want to get everything set up before it comes in the door. While you still have that sales support with you, you want to get all of your additional support, because you have to be added in for the platinum support area. Get all of that set up before you get your product in.

It's not as good as we expected, but it's definitely better than what I've seen with other companies.

The most valuable feature is definitely the performance. However, it's also a platform for both performance and consolidation. Once you start leveraging Exadata with Database In-Memory and Multitenant, you've got a really solid platform for database enterprise computing.

If you have server footprint reduction or consolidation as a requirement, then you can consolidate several databases and configurations onto one platform. Combine that with performance, it becomes a great avenue for cost reduction in terms of OpEx and CapEx. Exadata cannot be one-dimensional solution, performance, consolidation, and scalability must be part of the overall solution.

I think Oracle Enterprise Manager has come a long way with monitoring and managing Exadata, but getting the patching down would go a long way. I think the patching is still lacking quite a bit. If we can get the patching and upgrade in place, that would make a huge impact in overall supportability. I realize there is new OEM functionality recently introduced to support this, but it needs to be flushed out and tested.

It's been great. The stability has really, really improved a lot over the last couple of years.

It's been fantastic. With all the additional flash, with the faster CPUs, the faster disks, it's really come a long ways. The introduction of the X6 is also going to be an interesting avenue.

Tech support has been really good. That goes a long way because you have some comfort, stability in the fact that you've got somebody that you can lean on. You don't always have those skill sets. Since we're a services company, we do have those skill sets in that area, but most customers may not have that.

These guys are very well versed in the technology. They understand not only the storage software part of it, but the database as well as the hardware aspect of it -end to end. The most surprising aspect of Exadata is really the support.

It is quite difficult, but again since we're a services company, we're pretty well versed in it. We actually help customers do that end-to-end. Not only do we help bring Exadata in, we help do the installation and configuration and migration to the Exadata, as well as sustainability for future.

It takes a lot of planning depending on your downtime for conversion, depending where [platform] you're coming from. All those things play a big part in what tools you use and how you use them.

It is an expensive stack, so there's those things to keep in mind. The upside is that once you've bought into the technology, you have to embrace it , if that's the direction you want to go.

It is really good for what it's supposed to do. It's a great technology for Oracle-based solutions. There's pluses and minuses in everything. Any time you get an engineered system like that, you have to be geared for organizational [boundary] changes. Understand how the technology is supposed to work, how it's going to change the way you do your day-to-day business.