Oracle Exadata Reviews

Performance.

Excavation is purely for the storage of the data warehouses. It does what it needs to do. It performs. We have an active-passive DR. We tested it, it works. We can switch datacenters within reasonable time and go completely live in another data center on the technology we have.

We bought the whole stack, so we have extra discs. We have one month to show that an application doesn't work. We found out that installing and running the software on Oracle, was better than on the other platforms we used before.

Off the top of my head I can't think of anything.

A year and a half to two years.

No downtime.

In my eyes, it is going to meet the company's needs moving forward.

We have some very good internal guys who handle most of the issues. Actually, we haven't had many issues at all.

No vendor is reliable. We say there's a difference between proven in PowerPoint and proven in practice. We always find out in practice if it really works.

Personally, what I like to see is somebody who understands the business. What I see is that a lot of vendors are mainly focused on technology and not on the business functions you want to build. I believe that technology can be bought while the intellectual property is in the business services that you deliver to an organization. That's what I look for.

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.

It enables us to consolidate, that's one thing. We have consolidated five databases into one box, so that definitely a cost-savings there. We migrated from ODS to X5-2, so that is one thing.

The second thing of course are the extra features like the storage indexes. In short, the main feature that we take advantage of is the intelligence within the  storage which makes it no longer a "dumb storage" server. That is another main thing.

We did some PoC tests with our own data, and we were really getting 10x using Hybrid Columnar Compression, unique to Exadata, so some cost savings there.

Those are the things. Performance has gotten better, less footprint, and consolidation.

Including the migration, it's around a little more than a year now.

It has been pretty stable. We haven't seen many issues. Yes, we have hit some bugs, but otherwise it's pretty stable. It's a lot of mature boxes now. It's, again, an X5-2; it's mature enough.

We have a half rack now. If we at all feel like we need more compute, we can definitely add on more racks. So scalability, definitely a yes.

It is excellent. In our organization, my team did the first migration, so it was all new to everyone. From the installation team to internal support teams, and my team which is the application DBAs, which really worked on the migration. Checking stuff and letting us know if there were any changes to be made; for all of those, even with the migration, we got excellent support.

That was part of the agreement between the parties, that they would help us with the first migration.

We were using ODS.

Personally, my requirements when looking for in a vendor: Definitely one is they have to be leading in that technology in the industry. The vendor should also make me want to use the latest proven technologies, we cannot take chances with that. Whichever is the case, whatever we are using a product for, that particular product has to be the industry best. That is one thing.

Another thing is definitely that it needs to be a known partner like Oracle. They know the people we know, so that gives comfort that, middle of the night, if you have an issue, you can call this person. In short, proven support.

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.

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.

I like its reliability. I like the storage cell because of the amount of RAM and memory. It has the ability to do a lot of things, so that it doesn't transfer as much data out as other systems do.

Once we went to Exadata, we started doing statistics on a weekly basis. Between the two of them, things have stabilized quite a bit; didn't need as much tuning, and so it required less DBA time to do that. DBAs were freed up to do other work.

We have a 2X. Because I don't know what the 6X does, I don't know what additional features I’d like to see them include in future releases.

It's very stable and very reliable.

I work with the PeopleSoft systems on the databases and it's doing just fine. I don't have to scale out.

I don't believe we’ve had to use technical support. We had a little bit of help at the beginning to get everything installed; after that, it just ran.

Someone in the upper management decided to spend some money, and we had the machines; he said use them.

I was allowed to help with some of the initial setup. Most of it was handled by the DBA core team; what I did was give some ideas on how we ought to do some things.

What size of database are you working with? What kind of reliability and stability do you need? Is the cost worth what they would get out of the stability.

I like the Oracle database. I find Oracle as a whole has a very stable database. As far as the Exadata is concerned, as I’ve mentioned, I didn't have a choice in the matter. Nonetheless, if given my druthers, I would stick with it because it is reliable, even though it is kind of expensive.

My rating reflects its reliability. If I was rating it just on cost, I would rate it much lower.

Smart scan and smart indices are the most valuable features.

It improved the query performance.

I would like to see improvement in retail store response times.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were deployment issues, but the dev team fixed them.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

I would give customer service a rating of 7/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The installation was straightforward with Oracle support.

We implemented with Oracle.

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.