Said Mokhtari - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at TGR
Real User
Top 5
Scalable, reliable, and good support
Pros and Cons
  • "Oracle Exadata is stable."
  • "I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."

What is our primary use case?

We use Oracle Exadata for Oracle databases.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Oracle Exadata is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory.

Everyone in the organization is using the solution in my organization.

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How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good, we have not had a problem.

How was the initial setup?

The initial installation is not difficult, it took two to three days to complete.

What about the implementation team?

We used an integrator for the implementation of Oracle Exadata. We have qualified integrators in Morocco.

We have a few engineers and administrators doing the maintenance and support of the solution.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

You have to pay for the storage and the database in Oracle Exadata. It cost a lot, but it is worth it. It would be a benefit if we could reduce the price for the number of CPUs and extend the memory.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Oracle Exadata a ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Data Quality Software Development Manager at Yapı Kredi Bank
Real User
Performance is one of the key features, allowing us to bring in more data. It provides us with more subject areas for reports. And now supporting the Cloud service.
Pros and Cons
  • "It is a highly relevant option with extreme performance."
  • "I would like to see more database features and maybe more archiving features, because we need to do data archiving."

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is durable. It is a highly relevant option with extreme performance. The extreme performance is one of the key features when you're using Exadata. There are known points that you need to take care of, simply "beware of update".!

How has it helped my organization?

I'm currently writing a data warehouse on Exadata. Before this solution, we were aiming for this to be completed by 8 a.m., when our ETLs would finish. With the help of Exadata's special features, this was reduced to 3 a.m.

This solution allows us to bring more data within the same time period. It provides us with more subject areas that provide more reports to our users. Our ETL times reduced to 65%, then to 50%.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see more database features and maybe more archiving features, because we need to do data archiving. I would like to see additional database memory.

For how long have I used the solution?

My first implementation was in 2009 and still using.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There's nothing bad to say about Exadata. It's stable, durable, and always up and running. My DBAs do online patches and online backup.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This product is scalable. We first started with the quarter rack, and then we expanded to the full rack.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Previous to this solution, we were using a normal Oracle RAC service. We were just waiting for this product to come out.

How was the initial setup?

The installation is easy because it comes out-of-the-box and you just start using it.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We had already chosen Exadata, so we didn't compare this solution with many other products.

What other advice do I have?

Get the database on Oracle first. If you are in an Oracle stack, it would be much better to use the Oracle products. If you are driving a Ferrari, you wouldn’t put a Mercedes engine in it. If you are writing a query, you cannot rely on other brands.

I'm an architect, so when I look for a product, I look for performance.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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March 2024
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it_user452334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Principal Consultant at Pythian
Video Review
MSP
It's cost-effective for a lot of organizations. I would rate highly some of the specialized mechanisms that Oracle has put in place.

What is most valuable?

It's pretty simple in my opinion. It's called out the box, and it's called support. Sometimes with the engineered systems based on the support agreement that you have with the vendor, sometimes you hear about problems with your system from them rather than your applications experiencing some issues, and you're having to log a support ticket with Oracle. I think that's huge.

How has it helped my organization?

The thing that attracts them to the two products but mainly the Exadata is the storage technology is revolutionary whether it's the only solution of that flavor on the market or not, I'm not familiar with. It's the storage solution, it's the speed, and it's the high availability. If somebody wants 5 or 6 9s worth of availability, a very good place for them to be is with one of Oracles engineered system solutions.

What needs improvement?

As is always the case with Oracle, when some late-breaking fancy technology gets under their radar, self-invented or perhaps something that they're picking up that they'd like to compete with from another vendor, they're all over it. I can't specifically think of anything myself. Outside I guess of speed and maybe the other two things I could think of are speed and speed, but I'm not suggesting that speed is an enhancement because there's anything wrong with the speed of the system now, but of course we always like to do things in four nanoseconds rather than seven.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I think I would probably give it a capital S. People here peripherally hear about informational stuff that may be going on in the cluster, but as far as catastrophic events that may happen with the cluster, a lot of them in some way, shape or form are not far from self-healing. I think that's a huge advantage of an engineered system.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

If you buy a quarter rack, you feel like you need more computing power, you upgrade to a half rack. You go to a 3/4 or a full rack. It's basically I guess we used to call it plug and play except a lot of us found it in the olden days, it was plug and pray. I think they've got that one licked to the max.

How are customer service and technical support?

Sometimes it's them calling us on behalf of one of our clients, but I would find that once one figures out the best way to work with their support organization in general, but their engineered systems support organization in particular, I can't think anything outside of a world class organization. I would admit that I don't have a lot, if any, experience with the competition, but I don't feel like I need any experience with the competition because of the way they do support those two products.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

A lot of the times it ends up being complaints from the user community, and difficulty with strategic activities that the system performs. If you're running a commercial off the shelf application against these engineered system, sometimes it's a little more complex to work with a third party vendor, to speed things up. Mainly it's complaints from the user community. You and I both know that if something takes four seconds all the time and takes seven seconds some of the time, all the people are going to remember is the seven seconds.

What about the implementation team?

I haven't done it on a hands-on basis, but I believe that what I mentioned at the beginning about out of the box is just that. Oracle from my recollection first tried to venture into some form of engineered system in the '90s with HP. It was a red box that you basically took out of the carton and plugged in. I think that's pretty much close to what once you brought it onto the network, exactly what you're going to do with their systems, so I thinks it's plug and play.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Choosing a vendor: obviously cost, high availability, and the strength of the rack technology. It's a corner of the Oracle technology that basically not exactly gets reinvented, but the new features and the new ways of going about to do things and the capabilities of failover and all that is a huge concentration as the product matures, not that it is immature. I think that's a primary reason that people might consider looking at this. There's absolutely no doubt, it's not far from an upgrade basically being done on the fly. There's so many things that can be done online. The plague of course of the '90s and the early-2000s was downtime.

What other advice do I have?

Rating: I'd call it about a 12 out of 10. Of course you have to be able to afford the box. You have to be able to afford the configuration that you're going to be getting into. It's cost-effective for a lot of organizations, but I would rate the technology very high. Some of the specialized mechanisms that Oracle has put in place, especially with respect to Exadata and the late-breaking version of Exadata in particular.

As I said before, I'm not intimately or even somewhat peripherally familiar with the competition, but these guys know what they're doing, and my experience has been in the past that if Oracle ever plays catch-up in a technology spectrum with the competition, watch out. We all know that it's now cheap. It's affordable for a lot of organizations. If cost is going to be something, it's going to ultimately drive an organization's buy or no buy decision. The benefit after the money is spent and an ongoing outflow of cash to the vendor, if it makes business sense for somebody, I don't think they can be in a better place.

Make sure it's the right solution. Make sure that you do indeed need their real application cluster solution, which we affectionately call rack. Make sure it's right for you. It sounds corny, and it's sounds like a cliché, but it applied when I got started in IT in the 1800s, and it still applies. If it's cost-effective, go for it.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're partners.
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Robin Saikat Chatterjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Robin Saikat ChatterjeeHead of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Solutioning Technology and Architeture at Tata Consultancy Services
Top 5LeaderboardReal User

Support Stability ease of use and the guarantee that it will work well together, these are signature engineered system features. Now with the options of Eighth rack and Capacity on demand the entry level cost for a box has gone down quite a bit for the amount of flash and spinning disk you get.

Specialist, Database & Hadoop Administration at Robi Axiata Limited
Real User
A scalable and stable solution with good performance
Pros and Cons
  • "The tool's performance is good."
  • "The solution's pricing is very high."

What is most valuable?

The tool's performance is good. 

What needs improvement?

The solution's pricing is very high. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the tool for four years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. Certain companies in my organization use the solution like the marketing, IT, and analytics departments. 

How was the initial setup?

The product's setup takes around two to three days to complete. 

What about the implementation team?

We rely on the local vendor company to help us with the installation. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I would rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten. 

What other advice do I have?

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:
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Senior Database Consultant at Riyad Bank
Reseller
Top 20
Has very good hardware and provides fast, and high performance
Pros and Cons
  • "Oracle Exadata has very good hardware."
  • "Checking the Smart Scan issues is complicated."

What is our primary use case?

I work as an Oracle Database Admin supporting databases. 

What is most valuable?

Oracle Exadata has very good hardware and provides fast, and high performance.

What needs improvement?

To use Oracle Exadata's Smart Scans and have it perform faster, I have to adapt the database, the statement, and the tables.

Checking the Smart Scan issues is complicated, particularly troubleshooting the infinity band and the storage sales performance. In future releases, I would like to see more troubleshooting tools.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have 15 years of experience working with Oracle.

How are customer service and support?

Oracle support is very bad, it is not good at all. They do not provide a solution in suitable time.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Oracle Exadata is difficult, particularly if you want to repair the discs. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing of Oracle Exadata is too high. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I evaluated IBM, the 15, to compare it with Oracle Exadata. I compared the processes and the process structure.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
PeerSpot user
it_user521646 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director - OSP/Engineered Systems at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
It provides performance and reliability.

Valuable Features

Oracle Exadata provides very good performance and reliability. It's a highly reliable system and provides maximum performance.

Improvements to My Organization

The business outcomes are much faster; end users are very happy so they can focus on their day-to-day work rather than waiting for the computer, the response from the system. In many customer cases, reports that used to take 10-12 hours get completed in 1-2 hours, a massive reduction. A business cycle that used to take about 3-5 days to turn around can be turned around in 1 day, so that's where we optimize our business utilization; much more efficiency.

Room for Improvement

A major concern from customers is that it's very costly, but if they think about the total cost of ownership over 3-5 years, I think the total cost attests to the business readiness and it doesn't come out to be very costly.

Stability Issues

Exadata is pretty stable. There are built-in high-availability features. For example, every component – including the power supply, the fan, the CPU, and the memory – is redundant; you're buying a highly available system.

Scalability Issues

It absolutely scales to our customers’ needs. You can start with a two-node configuration, and you can go as high as eight racks, I believe, connected together with eight nodes, so you can scale up to 64. That number might have changed recently. You can scale it very well.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Technical support is fantastic. Oracle supports Exadata customers as the top tier, and you get support when you need it. Oracle has separate Exadata support. Once you buy Exadata, you go to that dedicated team and the turnaround is very, very good.

Initial Setup

Initial setup is complicated and you need to engage Oracle to do that. Obviously, nobody else can do that. It's complicated, but it's a part of the process.

Other Advice

It's a very good product. I think if you have a business use and can justify the cost, go and buy it. You'll never regret it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user436020 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Oracle Database Administrator at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Smart Scan gives us the ability to perform a large amount of processing on the storage side.

Valuable Features

The most valuable feature would be Smart Scan because it gives us the ability to perform a large amount of processing on the storage side, cutting down on I/O tremendously. That's one of the big features that really drew us into jumping on Exadata.

We also like having the ability to have a lot of flash storage where a lot of our data can be in-memory, which speeds up transactions and processing.

Improvements to My Organization

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Exadata helps us to consolidate and manage our databases as one with much faster processing. This, of course, is the key in speeding up our ability to do work and provide customer service. We're a mutual fund company, so speed is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. Exadata really gives us the key factors from an IT perspective, which are performance and availability.

Room for Improvement

There's a lot with Exadata that can be done on a black-box level which depends entirely on what the vendor is able to do for you, which is good from a certain perspective. But we hope, as this technology matures, Oracle allows customers to have a little more hands-on customization of some certain elements to better suit their environments. So we're looking forward to the ability to do greater customizations to suit our business needs.

Deployment Issues

Deployment wasn't difficult and we had no issues with it. Oracle had a bad rap in the past with customers who had bigger systems. They didn't provide them with enough assistance in order to assimilate new products and tools. But now, they've done a pretty good job of creating a very thorough cookbook, which has helped a lot with issues they we and my peers at other companies have had. Some of the issues was in the way we set up our enterprises which made it difficult to bring in and assimilate new products, but Oracle has lately done a good job of smoothing that out.

Stability Issues

Exadata has been a very stable product once configured properly. We've had no issues with instability.

Scalability Issues

It's scaled to our needs.

Customer Service and Technical Support

We have premier-level technical support, so we have a pretty good relationship with them.

Initial Setup

I would describe the initial setup as being of medium complexity. We're a financial insurance company, so we always want to put in a lot of rigor, in terms of security and compliance. At times, it's not our own fault, but it's our devices, but at the same time, the price of being exploited is bigger than what it takes to ensure security and compliance. The issue has been really more of the rigor that we put in ourselves, and finding a way to allow those new products and solutions to work as they were expected through our hardening that we've done on our environment.

Other Advice

We want to stay at the front of the cutting edge, and we evaluate and realize that the benefit, the return on investment that Exadata brings for a company of our magnitude and size, is tremendous. We've exploited Exadata, and it's performed very well for us.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Oracle Techno Sales consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
The resource input/output management tool that allows you to manage the resources on the box
Pros and Cons
  • "Exadata is a fantastic machine. Two features stand out. The first is the resource input/output management tool that allows you to manage the resources to the neck on the Exadata box."
  • "I liked Spark, but it was discontinued when Exadata L6 came back. I loved it, and I wish they would bring back Spark integration."

What is our primary use case?

When you talk about Exadata, the phrase that comes to mind is "database consolidation." We are consolidating 28 different databases from the revenue authority in Exadata. Fortunately, close to 70 percent of those databases are on Oracle, but they were all on Oracle 11g. We migrated them to 12c, and now we are pumping them into 19c to transfer them to the new Exadata X9M.

What is most valuable?

Exadata is a fantastic machine. Two features stand out. The first is the resource input/output management tool that allows you to manage the resources to the neck on the Exadata box. 

The second feature I like is ROC. I come from a data center background, so I've been doing storage and fabric interconnection to all that stuff. With ROC, where the fabric interconnection or the Brocade goes out of use, the data goes directly from storage to computation. It's great. 

What needs improvement?

I liked Spark, but it was discontinued when Exadata L6 came back. I loved it, and I wish they would bring back Spark integration.  

For how long have I used the solution?

I started working on Exadata in 2018. I was the first person in East Africa to be certified in Exadata in 2013, and I'm proud of that. In the past five months, I've been deploying Exadata for a government revenue authority as a consultant.

What was our ROI?

Exadata's database consolidation can save a lot of money. For example, one current customer was spending close to $800,000 on database licensing, but they are looking at $250,000 after consolidation.

If I walk into the office of any customer and I want to sell my Exadata, I tell the finance officer, "Boss, I plan to bring down your license costs by half." That's what I'll tell them. "If you want to see the magic, that's what I plan to do for you."

What other advice do I have?

I rate Oracle Exadata 10 out of 10.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Integrator
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