Mirantis is well suited for someone who doesn't mind spending money but doesn't quite want to commit to a cloud provider like AWS. It is also well suited for small or junior technical teams that don't have the skills, experience, or time to run their own openstack clusters.
Oracle Exalogic in conjunction with an Oracle Exadata based platform is what I would consider the best of breed solution; however the performance may be overkill for what you need. Don't spend the money unless you need the performance, Oracle offers other solutions at a much lower cost. Purchase what you need not what's the shiny new product.
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.
Mirantis OpenStack managed services are expensive. Very expensive for a start-up.
I'd personally like to see a little more under the hood details in the status pages.
Mirantis could also benefit heavily from a free "light" version that start-ups could use to run their own cloud. Maybe coupled with advertising or some sort of surveys.
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.
It is a very condensed version of what used to be rows of servers. I like that storage, networking and compute nodes fit in one rack. The power and the software are top notch. The only problem is cost. You need to do some serious processing to get the true value out of the Exalogic system.
Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes is easily manageable and has seamlessly configurable containers. It also has high reliability and security, which is certainly a positive point for this product. Overall I think it is a worthy competitor in the market to compare for your needs.
It's hard to compare Oracle Exalogic Engineered Systems with anything else on the market. It's so purpose built for application performance and intended to be used in conjunction with other Oracle Engineered Systems. As I alluded to earlier in this review the cost may not be worth the investment if the performance isn't needed. Oracle offers other solutions like the Oracle PCA which will meet the need for licensing compliance at a much lower cost of ownership and may fit better into your current infrastructure.
Mirantis did help our business figure out if openstack was right for us.
Using Mirantis I felt a bit cheated on understanding the deep technical knowledge of how openstack works. But that being said that is probably a value add more than a detractor for most people.
