Oracle Exadata Reviews

Fast performance and tons of storage that we can have to put a lot of databases under the Exadata Server are the most valuable features in this product.

For us, speed is the most important factor. For our SLAs, we need to maintain the performance. Thus, performance is one of the main criteria for our applications and that plays a major role.

Performance is what we always tend to work on and it could still be improved. For example, if we get Echo Calls then the performance also shoots up.

We have recently moved over to Exadata. Currently, we have not experienced any stability issues

We are still moving. So far it is satisfactory, although we are not getting our work locked under.

We did look at other products but Oracle has its way of marketing. We had IBM as the other competitor, but I don't know whether they have any product equal to Exadata.

Go for it if cost is not a factor.  It's been good; so far we have not experienced any issues.

The place where I've used it are mainly on the data warehouses with larger implementations, and having everything in one enclosure is really a lot nicer. Having the disk, all the memory, and all the networking, makes not just the implementation easier, but as you're running it, a lot simpler to administer. Because we're asking it to handle everything, it's a simple solution to administer and support. It also has plugins that makes it easier to monitor.

Definitely having the ability to have one machine do everything has been the biggest improvement for us organizationally. From the administration side, it helps. If one or two admins can handle it, they don't have to go all over the place to, such as to the storage team, the network team, or anywhere else because they can do a lot of things internally. Definitely, we've seen cost, time, and HR savings with several implementations.

Sometimes pricing can be a bit of an issue, especially if customers don't know exactly what they're getting. Maybe they've gone through the whole process and they didn't get the right size or the right amount. I've worked with several customers who had implementations that were too small and then had to upgrade, as well with others who were overpowered with their implementations.

The deployments have been issue-free.

We haven't really had any stability issues. The experiences we have had were when there have been hardware failures, but a Oracle took care of that pretty quickly. Our customer had databases and memory modules die and everything kept running. With the failures we've seen, it's stayed very consistent on the ones we've done.

If it's done with the right specs in mind, it seems to scale pretty well. We haven't really had any scalability issues.

Exadata is pretty much set up when it ships. Afterwards, you just have to copy data over and it's ready to go. So the setup is fairly easy and straightforward.

Definitely do a POC on it. Work closely with Oracle Professional Services to help you with the right configurations.

My primary use case of this solution is running the large database status regarding applications.

The cost of the product could be improved.

I have been using this solution for around ten years.

This is a very stable solution, which we have hardly any problems with.

The tech support for this product is fine, though sometimes they take some time to identify and rectify issues.

The installation took around one month.

We installed the database using an in-house team but Oracle prefers to do the box configuration themselves.

I would recommend this solution, particularly if you are running Oracle databases. I would rate this solution as an 8 out of 10.

They just have a lot of products, and they work well together.

I think it's free. That's one more thing.

I think it's better than the VMware from that perspective. I think it has improved quite a bit in the last 12 months. They're still lagging behind, but I like the new features they're introducing. I think that's why I'm one of the applicants for the product.

My organization is supposed to integrate Oracle products with our line of products too, so it doesn't really improve, but I think it's a synergy between the two companies, to be able to bring in the products from two companies and make it a better solution. I think there's a lot of synergy between the two for that.

Yes. Backup recovery, snapshot technology integrated with the hardware array, DR solutions, more of migrating VMs between different ones.

It would be nice to have a single click button to, say, migrate my VMware VM into the Oracle VM, or vice-versa. That is not available right now, and even the procedures there is really complicated, time-consuming.

Those are a lot of things we talk about with the Oracle VM engineers. They said they're short of resources, they can only prioritize certain things. I'm still hoping that they'll come out soon.

It is. Especially the new version, 3.4.

I have not been playing with the scalability, but I know they can scale pretty high. Especially I know they use it within their own MiniCluster product, and a lot of their appliances. I have no doubt it can scale.

Yes, I have actually. Kind of hit and miss.

It depends, I guess, on the support engineer really. I think I got more misses than hits.

No. It's just my focus of work. I'm supposed to work on Oracle products and their VM solutions, Oracle VM.

I do use the VirtualBox, but that's not enterprise grade, I don't think. Customers in an enterprise environment would not deploy VirtualBox for productions, but they would go with the normal VM for that.

Yes, straightforward.

The documentation is clear. The time to implement is really short. You put the CD in there, and you just kind of follow the prompts and you're done pretty much. I like that aspect of it.

If I were a customer and I had to choose, honestly there's only two other solutions out there, either VMware or Oracle VM. I think Hyper-V is too narrow-focused, so it would be out of my choices.

Again, if I wanted to choose between the two, if I'm not already a VMware customer, I would definitely go Oracle VM, especially when I run Oracle products already. Oracle databases, or middleware stuff.

I think it's just given me a better customer experience, one vendor to go to for support, one vendor to get patches. I believe that they can offer better integrations in the future. At least that's what I'm hoping for.

They have to look at their existing infrastructure, what they have, and what makes sense.

If they already have a big presence of VMware, it won't make sense to start with Oracle VM products. If they are just starting out, and want to test the waters and see what features, I would definitely recommend Oracle VM first. It does offer a lot of features that VMware does, with the right parts.

Storage Base Indexes, Caging and Hybrid Column Compression.

Put all the List of Value tables on Flash Storage for fast Reading in Oracle ERP, Performance Improved.

eAM, Inventory, Financial and Procurement and HR

6 Years

No

No

No

7 out of 10

7 out of 10

IBM AIX P5

Straightforward

In-house

Saved 48 CPU licensing after consolidation on Oracle Exa-data

Little bit high, but it is worth it.

Capacity Planning is Key

Best Solution for Oracle Databases

The most valuable feature is the flash cache. Let's say you have brought it in at the application level. You don't want to change your code. You take the object, you put it in the flash, and it runs fast.

The biggest benefit for organization is the performance. That's it. That's the endgame. We want to satisfy the client. When they click, they get it fast, and that's it.

Also, the fact that it reduces your IO because the storage and the server, everything's in the same box, makes it easier and faster.

Support.

It is stable.

Well, they give you a box. We haven't come to a case where we need to add more servers or nodes to it. For the moment, what we have is what we're using and it's doing what it's supposed to do.

Our main issue is the CPU; they can't cope with what we want. The application is CPU-bound. They have to find a way, talk to Intel, design something, so it's fast, so it can provide more CPU, more bang for the buck. It's expensive.

It depends on what the ticket is about. It's easy to open a ticket. Now, to get solution on this ticket, that's a different story because they start asking for all the logs. You give them the logs, and they still want more logs; all this time, the problem is not resolved. That’s not particular to the Exadata platform; it's a general Oracle issue. It can be an arduous process.

Also, when you open the ticket, you don't get a senior guy right away; you get a junior person. You have to complain, and say, "Guys I know what I'm talking about, move it.", before they go to the next level. Then, you get who you want. That's another issue, but they have been there for many years. They need to improve their technical support.

If you know what you’re doing, initial setup is no big deal.

We also evaluated Superdome. We decided to go with the Oracle product because we are an Oracle shop. Oracle has intelligence on what it's doing. It integrates really well.

The main thing I would tell people is, whoever is going to maintain it has to know what he's doing. When you spend your money and you don't have the good people, you don't get your money back. It's a waste of money. You have to know who you are putting on it, so they can give everything back to you. Otherwise, it's a good product.

It's a good product. It's stable.

The performance.

It makes it possible to deliver high performance Oracle OBIEE applications to our customers.

They need to reduce the cost. It needs to be a true appliance so you don’t have to manage individual components inside it. It needs to provide a better maintenance process, which means no downtime, and true rolling upgrade.

We used Oracle Exadata from 2010 to 2015.

I have deployed OEM 11g and 12c in High availability mode and was not too complicated to implement. I have not tried HA with 13c. However, installation for all the releases have been fine.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

We had some challenges on scalability. That time the only choice we had was to upgrade to a full rack from a ½ rack. However the newer version of Oracle Exadata has flexibility to upgrade. It can add database servers or storage servers not require to add ¼ or ½ racks.

6/10 - not because of people, but technology and architecture. A few times we had issue to completely fail a drive before we can replace it.

We had been using Oracle RAC on EMC disk array with Dell servers until the performance cannot really meet Oracle OBIEE application and some data warehouse applications’ performance requirement. We did look at Netezza and Datallegro, but they didn’t run the SQL that compatible with Oracle. By then Oracle Exadata seemed the only logical option for us. We also had a business reason to purchase Oracle Exadata at that time.

The initial setup was pretty smooth and straightforward.

We had Oracle team to setup the device.

The device performed very well, but the biggest challenge for us was the maintenance. Any firmware, code or OS upgrade took long time, which requires a downtime window. The rolling upgrade would even take longer so we never tried it. I heard that the new version of Exadata should be improved in this area, but we have moved off Oracle Exadata platform. The DR is another challenge since ideally you would want have to a Exadata at DR site, which in most cases is cost-inhibitive. I would say that make sure you can do rolling upgrade for minimizing the downtime, and find a cost effective DR solution especially if you use HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression).