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FlexPod XCS vs Oracle Exalogic [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

FlexPod XCS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
Converged Infrastructure (2nd)
Oracle Exalogic [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

John Kevin - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Director at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Enforces standardized setup procedures following Certified Validated Design (CVD) guidelines and offers greater flexibility and control over the system compared to traditional systems
The GUI setup follows the right setup, meaning we have to follow the CVDi.e. Certified Validated Design. Everything is clear, because you can build CI yourself, but without rules, it can be messy. With FlexPod, there are rules to follow, making it more standardized. This helps with troubleshooting and compatibility assessments, simplifying troubleshooting significantly. We also use FlexPod pre-validated architectures to validate the design. It is very, very important to us because we had a bad case in 2015 where separate items integrated poorly due to no version or firmware compatibility certification. Troubleshooting became a nightmare. So, standards are crucial for us, and everything entering production should be verified or at least documented for certification.
MK
AGM at Tech Valley Networks Limited
Good performance and stability with a straightforward setup
Typically, if a client needs support, they contact us and we are the ones to offer it to them. However, we have contacted Oracle technical support and we have a back-to-back contract with them. They support our HR on-site team. We also get support from Oracle functional services and backend support. They are usually quite good, but at times it depends on which engineer is working. When we get support from India, there's sometimes a delay. If it's from Europe or the US, often we get faster results. Time zones also affect technical support response times and will dictate who responds to our requests.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Traditionally, when you have multiple vendors, before FlexPod, everyone does a lot of finger pointing, and the fact that all these companies work together is invaluable."
"Everything is preconfigured. We can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box."
"NetApp is always coming up with features that I want before I know that I want them."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it combines storage and server – very streamlined, very flexible, and built upon reliability."
"The solution is resilient, because it has good scalability, and other products in the market don't have this. It has scalable storage and service."
"The ability to converge a lot of different data and platforms into a single common platform, then scale horizontally and vertically."
"Because all the testing and all the validation has been pre-done, a lot of that legwork does not need to be done at the user level."
"The most valuable feature is ease of deployment. Once I deploy the chassis and I have the back-end storage, configuring more UCS servers is very quick. I can deploy a new UCS server within minutes."
"This is NOT a product someone wants to deploy in a business that requires reliability and accountability."
"The ability to have ZFS (shared file systems) with InfiniBand, and an InfiniBand connection to the Exadata database is very useful."
"Exalogic offers integration with other engineered systems, which increases the throughput capability and enables processing of bigger and heavier workloads."
"Scalablility: When we need to upgrade from an eighth-rack to a full-rack, the real downtime is less then an hour."
"We get better performance and utilization of resources since it was implemented, and it has helped to reduce the batch cycle from over 40 hours to about eight."
"There are many benefits of Exalogic, but I believe the most important point is production stability."
"Server consolidation. In a cloud architecture, moving the HA VM from one to other is faster. This is because of the InfiniBand network fabric between the compute nodes and storage nodes (ZFS Storage)."
"On comparison with other solutions, VM for example, we saw a 70% performance improvement."
 

Cons

"This is an expensive solution."
"There were several different management consoles that we had to deal with: UCS, VMware, and separate ESXi installations. Maybe one interface council where we could manage everything from might be a little easier."
"There is a history of issues with hardware availability. It becomes this big process to try to figure out what we need to get, how it'll work, and how that'll integrate into the system."
"If they could reduce some of the complexity at the system manager level for ONTAP. I find it gives a lot of flexibility. You can do as much or as little as you want. But to be able to do as little as you want, you do have to do a lot. So, if they could bring that down to a more manageable effort level, that would be nice and simplify it a bit."
"I'd like to see a little more on the provisioning and the replication piece... Also, I don't want to say analytics are lacking but I'd like to see more analytics."
"The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions."
"I would like to see a more centralized support model."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"The product is good but complex, and requires extensive internal knowledge to build it up and support."
"Initially, yes, there were stability issues. A number of redesigns were needed to stabilize the Hypervisor, control the stack layer, as well as the software defined network drivers (Mellanox bugs causing compute nodes to reboot)."
"Every deployment or configuration change in Exalogic is a surprise. It is not reliable."
"There's a lot of additional features I would like to see in the Exalogic. The user interface would be nice to better integrate into Enterprise Manager 13 and eliminate the whole EMOC layer to the Exalogic."
"OTD (Oracle Traffic Director) is failover architecture and is not as robust as advertised. Additionally, SSO and several other features sometimes went down."
"Exadata's current speed is almost enough but sometimes much slower than the older mainframe systems, so some performance improvements would be helpful."
"We have had issues with the stability as the product failed on its promise for replication of all the components."
"Provisioning more than a dozen VMs can be problematic for the proxy servers to handle, and some of the jobs fail."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cost-effective."
"We have reduced our manpower with the solution."
"The NetApp portion was a $5 million investment five years ago. That has served the customer well over five and a half years."
"We purchased the solution through CDW. They are a partner and knowledgeable."
"It is expensive. My company is small. When you look at the price point, this is a big thing for us to invest in."
"Coming from a rack and stack server model to FlexPod, it has saved us a lot of time (approximately hundreds to thousands of hours)."
"The footprint in the data center is quite large, especially when you scale out. Maybe find some hardware in the future, where if a new blade comes out, then Cisco can say, "Look, we'll buy those blades back off you, and we'll give you this blade for X amount of money." A buyback scheme would be good for hardware, and even NetApp as well. Something like a buyback scheme for blades and stuff moving forward would be good, because I know that they're going to put more power into them. E.g., replacing four blades might equal one blade, which would be awesome, but we are still going to have those four blades around. Maybe having something where it will give you this much money for these blades so we can upgrade. That would be perfect."
"We have saved time and money for new service deployments. Without FlexPod, it probably takes about ten hours. With FlexPod, within two hours, we are up and running. So, we have seen about an 80 percent time decrease."
"Get the price of the license you will need for the middleware that will be running on top of the Exalogic. Otherwise, you can use another middleware solution, as long as it can run on top of Oracle Linux."
"To expand the hardware's capability requires a massive investment."
"Pricing and licensing are two very delicate aspects when talking about Oracle, especially engineered systems. The prices are quite high compared with other similar products, so the CapEx analysis and investment return have to be very well studied."
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
13%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
25%
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise14
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

No data available
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Sao Paulo, WD-40, The Commonwell Mutual Insurance Group
Sascar, Banca Transilvania, UL, Agilent, Reliance Commercial Finance, PT Bank Central Asia Tbk, Bank of Qingdao, Yarra Valley Water, FAW Car Co. Ltd.
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