IBM Power vs. Oracle Exadata

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Power
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The IBM Power product line is a family of servers.N/A
Oracle Exadata
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Exadata is an enterprise database platform that runs Oracle Database workloads of any scale and criticality with high performance, availability, and security. Exadata’s scale-out design employs optimizations that let transaction processing, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads run faster. Consolidating diverse Oracle Database workloads on Exadata platforms in enterprise data centers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and multicloud environments helps organizations increase…
$2.90
Per Unit
Pricing
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Database Server
$2.9032
Per Unit
Quarter Rack
$14.5162
Per Unit
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Considered Both Products
IBM Power
Chose IBM Power
1. Cost effective 2.Highly scalable 3.Fantastic performance.
Oracle Exadata
Chose Oracle Exadata
IBM POWER System is a general purpose hardware optimize to runs various software with high-performance resource intensive operations. On the other hand, Oracle Exadata Database Machine is specifically engineered to run Oracle Database software efficiently, this combination of …
Features
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
IBM Power
-
Ratings
Oracle Exadata
9.2
3 Ratings
2% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings7.62 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
IBM Power
-
Ratings
Oracle Exadata
10.0
1 Ratings
7% above category average
Data model creation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
IBM Power
-
Ratings
Oracle Exadata
7.0
1 Ratings
8% below category average
Visualization00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Data Warehouse
Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Product A and Product B
IBM Power
-
Ratings
Oracle Exadata
9.3
3 Ratings
11% above category average
High-Volume Data Processing00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Data Warehouse Management00 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Administrative Automation00 Ratings7.93 Ratings
Self-Optimization00 Ratings9.13 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Small Businesses
Dell PowerEdge
Dell PowerEdge
Score 8.0 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
HPE ProLiant DL
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 8.6 out of 10
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Z
IBM Z
Score 9.4 out of 10
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(208 ratings)
10.0
(23 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(4 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.4
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM PowerOracle Exadata
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
I'd strongly recommend IBM Power servers to anyone who has the budget for it. A Power Virtual Machine, what is generally called FlexTB VM, can support as many small VM of 256GB, and scale up to 32TB on the fly. If IBM recommended architecture is combined with your organizational reference architecture, then forget about running into unplanned downtimes.
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Oracle
Oracle Exadata is well-suited for environments where massive performance for Oracle databases is required. Storage indexes reduce the unnecessary I/O. Smart Flash
Cache accelerates random reads/writes.

Our OLTP application demands very high concurrency. Multi-node Exadata provides high availability and zero downtime during DB patching. It comes with lots of built-in automations, so it reduces many routine tasks for sysadmins, like network, storage, and VM configuration, and it also reduces many Oracle DBA tasks, like Oracle software installation, patching, and upgrades.
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Pros
IBM
  • I love how it supports a mix of operating systems
  • protection of our sensitive energy data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations.
  • It provides a flexibility that ensures that we can accommodate increased workloads without a complete overhaul of our infrastructure.
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Oracle
  • Oracle Database : Deliver industry-leading security, high availability and scalability with Oracle Database, which has been significantly enhanced to take advantage of the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers.
  • Exadata Smart Scan : Improve query performance by offloading intensive query processing and data mining scoring to scalable intelligent storage servers.
  • Smart Flash Cache : Transparently cache 'hot' read and write data to fast solid-state storage, improving query response times and throughput. Exadata systems use the latest PCI flash technology rather than flash disks. PCI flash delivers ultra-high performance by placing flash directly on the high speed PCI bus rather than behind slow disk controllers.
  • Hybrid Columnar Compression : Reduce the size of data warehousing tables by 10x, and archive tables by 50x, to improve performance and lower storage costs for primary, standby, and backup databases. Query high, query low, archive high and archive low.
  • Infiniband Network : Connect multiple Oracle Exadata Database Machines using the InfiniBand fabric to form a larger single system image configuration. Each InfiniBand link provides 40 Gigabits of bandwidth–many times higher than traditional storage or server networks.
  • Petabyte Scalability : Easily scale data warehouse to support enterprise data growth.
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Cons
IBM
  • A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has.
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Oracle
  • The process of patching and upgrade of Exadata server components could be improved with a goal to minimize the overall effort, make it fully automated and transparent.
  • Improved guidelines and possibly more sophisticated tools for sizing of new Exadata servers for migration from old legacy hardware.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
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Oracle
No answers on this topic
Usability
IBM
They are very easy to set up and use once you re knowledgeable enough to deal with it. They are continuously enhance the user experience on the HMC and operations on the systems. Once setup it's like a beast, going on and on. I have experience with servers that are not being rebooted for more than 1000 days
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Oracle
I am comparing Exadata with the Oracle RAC database experience. In addition to Oracle RAC features, Exadata provides automatic performance optimization through Smart Scan and storage indexes. Deep integration with the Oracle ecosystem and tight coupling with Oracle Enterprise Manager
for monitoring and management. Some downsides of Exadata are: a steep learning curve, concepts like cell offloading, IORM, and flash cache behavior aren’t intuitive initially. Operating
Exadata requires specialized DBA skills.
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
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Oracle
No answers on this topic
Performance
IBM
The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
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Oracle
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM
On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
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Oracle
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
IBM
Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
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Oracle
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
IBM
Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
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Oracle
Oracle Exadata Database Machine had the best performance overall hands down. It clearly beat the competition and we were seeing 1000X improvement on SAP HANA. Oracle Exadata Database Machine beat that without us refactoring our code. To achieve that in HANA, we had to refactor the code somewhat. Now this was for our limited POC of 5 use cases. Given the large number of stored procedures we had in Sybase, we need to capture more production metrics but we are seeing incredible performance.
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Scalability
IBM
This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
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Oracle
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • In the event of a crash, IBM Power servers offer a variety of simple options to recover the operating system.
  • With the flexibility offered by IBM Power servers, the production business can be improved by making the most of its physical servers.
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Oracle
  • Single support from a single vendor with both machine and database from Oracle, which is costing us less.
  • With Exadata, we need less technical manpower and less technical support. A business transaction with the integrated and centralized database helps us focus on other business needs.
  • We don't need to buy additional licenses and Hardware for the next 3 to 5 years.
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ScreenShots

IBM Power Screenshots

Screenshot of IBM Power E1180Screenshot of IBM Power E1150Screenshot of IBM Power S1124Screenshot of IBM Power S1122