Canonical OpenStack vs. Oracle Exalogic

Ubuntu OpenStack is well suited for startups where there are very tight financial constraints. As Ubuntu OpenStack is open source, the startup organizations will not have to spend a lot when compared to their commercial offerings in the market. Ubuntu OpenStack is less appropriate in organizations where they don't want to have private on-prem clouds. As deploying a private on-prem cloud is a very cumbersome and tedious task, the organizations must have a dedicated team to manage such on-prem deployments.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use, learning curve is very short. Don't need to invest months of training before using it
• Well suited with Jenkins for automated tests
• Works well on large sets of heterogeneous hardware

• 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.

Incentivized

• More customizable options while choosing virtual machine configurations would be great.
• To have regular online learning sessions directly from Ubuntu OpenStack experts [to] help users and for those who implement it.
• Giving admin more control on what privileges they can grant to their users.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Everybody knows VMWare which is the world's number one in data center infrastructure management. OpenStack is lot lot less expensive but doesn't offer all the functionalities you have with VMWare especially for High Availability and load balancing. You should go for OpenStack if you need an easy to use solution without the need for external consultants. If you don't have the capacity to manage your own infrastructure you had better go for VMWare.

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.

Incentivized

• Lighter on initial spending for the organization.
• Deployments which have no vendor locking makes management decisions easier.
• Support from great community saved lot of time for engineers managing it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized