A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Solution Architect - Cloud & On-Premise Database & Middleware - Engineered Systems Specialist in Information Technology at Bridge Consulting S.r.l. (51-200 employees employees)
Pros
Private Cloud: in the virtual configuration, you can create several accounts and assign different resources (vCPU, RAM, etc.) to several departments in your organization.
SDP & Infiband: Oracle Exalogic can be connected to Oracle Exadata using Infiniband Fabric, to take advantage of high bandwidth and low latency network to connect Weblogic to Oracle Database.
Standardization: Oracle Weblogic Server running on Oracle Exalogic is the same software running on a normal Linux machine, so you can easily move Java applications without changing it, and immediately benefit from the Exalogic Optimizations.
Cons
My customers don't appreciate the Enterprise Manager Ops Center to monitor/maintain Exalogic. Maybe, the user interface could be simplified.
Return on Investment
Increase stability and performance of Weblogic Server applications.
Platinum Support: the patching process is simplified because storage/firmware/OS/binaries are patched in the same time by the same vendor.
Cost savings for hardware maintenance.
Other Software Used
Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle WebLogic Application Server
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Principal Consultant in Information Technology at Tata Consultancy Services (10,001+ employees employees)
Pros
Because Exalogic uses SR-IOV it is the only virtualization technology that can provide wire sped transfers to the virtual machines. This enables performance indistinguishable from physical machines.
Since Exalogic comes as a integrated engineered system the maintenance is much more codified. This reduces vendor finger pointing and guarantees that things will either work well with each other from the get go or will be speedily resolved. The ability to have that level of confidence in the stability of a platform is very encouraging for customers.
Oracle has provided special optimizations specifically for Weblogic. There are special communication protocols that are enabled when Exalogic communicates to an Oracle Database Running on the Exadata Database Machine that multiply benefits. things like RAC aware databse connections allow quick recovery in case of loss of a database node with minimal disruption to individual transactions and no loss in availability of the overall applications.
Cons
Currently, the management of Exalogic is a little arcane. There is a good chance that Oracle can bring flexibility into the control stack because we have seen changes with each version of the software Echo was an improvement and foxtrot even more so. The ability to easily change VM shapes was another welcome change.
Again the fact arises that to build a very high performance machine there will be idiosyncrasies and a certain amount of retraining may be required. I think this is one area where Exalogic lacks not as a product but as a solution is that there isn't as much good knowledge available about it as there is for other engineered systems.
The Exalogic default setup could do with an SSD storage option, currently the onboard comes with a spinning disk.
Return on Investment
For our clients who have deployed Exalogic, they have seen a many-fold reduction in the time for critical business processes.
Backups have been reduced by 20 times, snap clones and replication have created a more robust DR solution.
The processing capacity on the new Exadata Exalogic combined system is at least 7 times faster than their original system.
Other Software Used
Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Suite, Oracle eBusiness Suite
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Solutions Architect in Information Technology at Data Intensity, LLC (51-200 employees employees)
Pros
The primary benefit we have noticed from the Exalogic platform is performance. This systems was definitely purpose built for the needs of a highly available and heavily utilized application environment. The incredible throughput over NFS and heavy read cache ZFS appliance lend well to high read quick transaction type workloads. When implemented in conjunction with an Exadata environment the throughput between your application and database is simply amazing.
Additionally we have found that the time to deploy is lower than that of a more cumbersome Oracle VM infrastructure. I don't believe that this specific value proposition is all that great when comparing the deployment time of a VMware based solution, but will add value when compared to an in-house solution based on the same Oracle VM virtualization.
Finally we have found that the standardize configurations, while not all that unique to engineered systems, have added value when deploying Oracle application which tend to have strict configuration requirements.
Cons
My major complaint with the Exalogic platform is in the resilience of the ZFS appliance within the platform. This device should fail-over to the redundant controller when issue occur, however we have had three events in which this did not happen and a complete outage followed.
Additionally Oracle sales has a tendency to exaggerate the simplicity of this platform. The management overhead is great, and while my company provides managed service, for our specific customer they were surprised to find out how much work goes into run-and-maintain support.
Return on Investment
Unfortunately we are still early on in the deployment phase so true ROI isn't calculable at this point. We do however believe we have built a highly scale-able solution that will allow the companies core ERP systems to grow as they do.
Other Software Used
Oracle VM Server, Oracle EBS Financials, Oracle Enterprise Manager
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info