Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic systems are more expensive and provide less performance and interconnectivity, writes Wikibon Co-founder and CTO David Floyer in “The Limited Value of Oracle Exadata”, the first of two new Alerts on the products.  In the second, “Oracle Exadata and Exalogic Sales Not Meeting Expectations”,  he adds that they do not appear to be selling nearly as well as Oracle would have people believe.

Floyer’s analysis of Exadata vs single SKU appliances from other vendors show that Exadata’s total cost including maintenance, software, and hardware totals $7,960,000 while single SKU appliances have a total average cost of $4,206,500, making Exadata 83% more expensive.

In addition, he says, Exadata is a less than best-of-breed solution for very high availability and/or high performance, mission-critical OLTM and that “the storage subsystem is far below the functionality required” compared to other Tier 1 storage arrays, such as EMC VMAX.

The closed, proprietary nature of Exadata also causes extra expense and problems in many real-world environments, making it difficult to move data between an Exadata infrastructure and alternative systems. “As a result Exadata customers have found that they need to put all the Oracle database environment on Exadata appliances. This is a great lock-in for Oracle but adds to IT expenses significantly.”

In the second article, Floyer says that while Sun claimed a $1 billion backlog when it introduced Exadata in 2012, it since has reported only about 1,000 Exadata/Exalogic combined sales since then. Based on the assumptions that Oracle sold twice as may half-rack systems and full racks, and twice as many quarter-rack systems as half-racks, he projects that Exadata/Exalogic hardware sales for 2Q12 were about $84 million, or about 1% of Oracle revenue. Adding services and software brings total income for Oracle to 2%.

Interested readers can see the full analysis and add their own comments without charge on the Wikibon site.