Oracle Exadata Reviews

Exadata storage is very fast and it gives really good performance. Sometimes people buy a good server with a lot of CPU, pay a lot of money, but they have very poor storage performance and then they don't get enough performance from their system.

Exadata really gives good storage performance and our business applications run very fast.

It's perfect. I don't know what to improve in Exadata.

More than five years.

Very stable. In the last five years there was was just one occasion of downtime because one cell went down and because we had low free disk space. It was a little problem but it was solved.

I don't think it's so scalable because Exadata is a box. You can't do anything with this. It's a box, use it, that's all.

Support is much better for Exadata than for other products. Very fast response and sometimes much faster than for other systems. 

Sometimes if we have a bug on another database, we duplicate the database on Exadata, repeat the bug and they make a patch much faster.

We didn't set it up, Oracle set up Exadata. It's not permitted to set up Exadata by yourself. They bring it to you. It's ready for use.

I totally recommend buying Exadata. It's very good product. I haven't ever seen anything better than Exadata for Oracle Database.

The fact that it's an engineered system. It's a database in a box, storage, the networking, the compute engines. All of it's in one nice neat package. My DBAs like administering it. My application owners like its reliability on the back end.

Our ability to scale heavy workloads and our ability to consolidate lighter workloads and reduce our sprawl through the data sector.

Price. Extremely expensive. Maintenance is about industry average. They've got a pretty good upgrade roadmap. But it's been an expensive ride for us, but also a necessary one.

Very stable. No major issues. No downtime that was a result of bugs or some kind of defect in the platform.

It has scaled well.

As a member of IT management with business units breathing down our neck, when there is an issue we always feel the support can be faster but I don't get a lot of complaints. It's good support. Like everything, it could be faster. We'd want to be faster.

It was straightforward for us because we used an integrator partner to put it all in for us, and then our administrators stepped in and took over.

We're constantly looking at other products. We went with Exadata because we needed some muscle on the back end for an ERP implementation. We've been through Exadata first-generation, and right now we're putting in X6s. We've had X2s, X3s, X4s, and we're actually installing X6s right now as we lifecycle through.

It's a great investment for the large enterprise. I think with Exadata in the cloud, that's coming, that we're starting to look at - and they're obviously trying to push here at the conference - I think it'll open itself up to a lot of other customers that probably wouldn't have gone with such an expensive on-premise solution. We're excited about that, too. 

I would definitely recommend it to any colleagues.

Performance and storage is good.

Reduces cycle time for batch processing.

I would like to see better application performance.

We have been using this for six months.

There were no real deployment issues.

There were no stability issues so far.

There were no scalability issues so far.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical service is excellent.

We did not use a solution previous to this one.

The setup was straightforward, but porting applications to Exadata was complex.

We implemented through Oracle.

Our ROI was $500K savings.

These are on the high side.

We were really impressed with the performance of the applications.

The most valuable feature is the fact that it's an engineered system. It's a database in a box, storage, the networking, the compute engines. All of it's in one nice, neat package. My DBAs like administering it. My application owners like its reliability on the back end.

The benefits we see are our ability to scale heavy workloads, and our ability to consolidate lighter workloads and reduce our sprawl through the data center.

Price: It’s extremely expensive. Maintenance is about industry average. I think they've got a pretty good upgrade road map. It's been an expensive ride for us but a necessary one.

It is very stable; no major issues; no down time that was a result of bugs or some kind of defect in the platform.

It has scaled well to your needs.

As a member of IT management with business units breathing down our neck when there is an issue or something like that, we always feel the support can be faster but I don't get a lot of complaints. It's good support. Like everything, it could be faster. We'd want it to be faster.

Initial setup was straightforward for us because we used an integrator partner to put it all in for us, and then our administrators step in and take over.

We're constantly looking at other products.

We ultimately chose Exadata because we needed some muscle on the back end for an ERP implementation. We've been through Exadata first generation, and right now we're putting in X6s. We've had X2s, X3s, X4s, and we're actually installing X6s right now as we lifecycle through.

It's a great investment for the large enterprise. I think with Exadata in the cloud that's coming, that we're starting to look at and they are obviously trying to push at conferences, I think it'll open itself up to a lot of other customers that probably wouldn't have gone with such an expensive on-premise solution. We're excited about that, too. I would definitely recommend it to any colleagues.

We're very happy with it.

Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement.

One of the things that we are facing during these few months is how you manage the people environment, and it's something that we have to explore to understand what is happening inside these machines. 

We are facing some problems with authentication. I believe that we are not familiar with the Oracle virtual machines. That's why we need to improve ourselves to better understand what is going on inside this environment. 

The integration with third-party applications regarding access management security could be better. I would like that to be included and be available the first time. Most of them, we need to buy later, and we would like to have these components when we're actually testing if this component.

This is one thing that we are facing here in our environment. The integration becomes very difficult, and most of these features are not available the first time when you finalize the integrations.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for about six months. 

Oracle Exadata is a stable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle technical support a seven. The involvement of Oracle's people is something that they have to improve because they are operating in very poor countries. We need to clarify with them because the technical people's availability must be well organized for the job to go smoothly. 

Another thing is the language. We speak Portuguese, and the technical people don't speak another language. It starts to get very difficult to work like this. We are not English, and they are not English, and it becomes very difficult to communicate. 

They are the ones with the solution, so they are brilliant at working with Oracle. We can solve all the issues. They have time to share their experience with us. That's one thing that I stated to those guys working on this implementation.

The initial setup was straightforward. But this particular situation is different because we are not talking about putting it on and going into production. We have to move the initial systems to these environments. 

We need to convert some systems to be compatible with those environments. The main challenge is the IT infrastructure. It is not like we buy it, open it, create and edit it. We need to move, and that is the challenge. Right now, we are in the middle of finalizing this movement with migration from legacy to the new environment.

From a technical point of view, it didn't take long because it's straightforward. We started and went step by step until the end or until the machine was available for migration. It was very simple.

We worked with a technical team from Oracle, and our partners supported us and helped us do that. But most of the time, it was between my team and Oracle.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle Exadata ten.

performance

This is an engineered system by Oracle. It provides very fast communication between the storage and database. A lot of data processing is done at the storage level.

This makes the queries and processing much faster than before; reports can run within minutes rather than hours.

Cost is very high. It needs to be made affordable to grab more customer base. A lot of the technical enhancements are being made by Oracle regularly. Now, it is available on the cloud also.

If you deploy a normal server setup with SAN or direct disks, the cost is very low. Exadata machine is supplied by Oracle and hardware also maintained by Oracle. They charge as per their standards and pricing. Its quite costly in that regard.

I have used this solution for five years, since about the time it was launched.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues. In fact, scalability is one of its prime features, it is very flexible.

The technical support is, as usual, good from Oracle.

Earlier, we used SAN and the traditional servers. That was also good and time-tested for decades. This is all together a new concept.

It was a normal Oracle database setup.

The price and license costs are high as compared to the normal database setup. It depends on the client's requirements and size of the databases. Clients/ buyers have to take the call.

No other options were available in this category at that time or even now.

You should evaluate your requirements and budget.

The solution offloads the storage. This gives us great performance without impacting the CPU.

We have improved the average response time between 36% and 85%, depending on the database after migrating to Exadata.

We have been using this for 18 months.

There were no deployment issues. However, the process of configuring with OEDA requires a lot of information beforehand.

We only had a few stability issues with unexpected reboots.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

Exadata has great value. The storage CPUs do not count on the Oracle Database licenses.

If you are acquiring a larger configuration, I would advise you to consider getting two smaller ones, so you can:

• Get more memory
• Get additional, separate environments if required by your scenario. (You cannot virtualize OS on Exadata.)

Maybe you should not license every Oracle product if you do not need them on every database.

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.