Oracle Exalogic – the emperor has no clothes!

In my earlier post titled “Oracle Exalogic – the emperor has no clothes!”, I compared Oracle Exalogic to “classic” servers sold by IBM, HP, and others. The conclusion of that article was that Exalogic does have several interesting capabilities, but overall provides less flexibility and more vendor lock-in than classic server solutions. You might want to reread that article again for a refresher on Exalogic before proceeding with the information below.
This year IBM has really changed the game by introducing a new kind of integrated system. Here is an excellent six-minute video overview of the new IBM PureApplication System by Jason McGee. In this post, I compare IBM PureApplication System to Oracle Exalogic. Here is the summary of my analysis. The rest of this post explores each of these topics in more details.

Q: Is middleware preinstalled on my system?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Can I run the Java EE 6 runtime on my system?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: What about hardware specifications?
Here is a quick summary comparison of IBM and Oracle systems that are approximately similar in compute power:

* – please note that the cost of both systems above is calculated using list prices and includes comparable software configuration.

Q: How long does it take to get the system going?
IBM: Under four hours
Oracle: Likely over one week

Q: Is software cost included with my system?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Is there a way to track software licenses deployed on the system?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Is the system cloud enabled?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Are there third-party applications that I can run on the system?
IBM: Yes, over 80
Oracle: None known

Q: Can I virtualize all this computing power?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: Not sure

Q: Can I manage the system from a single management user interface?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Are compute nodes easily replaceable?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Does my system have built-in expertise?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: No

Q: Do I need to take an outage when making upgrades or repairing failures?
IBM: No
Oracle: Likely yes

Q: Which system is likely to provide higher overall performance and price/performance?

Q: Can I extend the built-in cloud capabilities of the system?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: N/A

Q: Can I evaluate the system remotely without the hassle of “rolling the box” into my data center?
IBM: Yes
Oracle: Not known

Summary
I hope this quick comparison will help you make an informed decision for selecting the right platform for your company needs. In my opinion, IBM provides a significantly better value with its “built-in expertise” approach compared to the “business as usual” architecture of the Oracle Exalogic. What I have described in this article is proof that Oracle Exalogic is not a strong competitor to the IBM PureApplication System. If you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, you need to compare Oracle Exalogic to one of the following IBM offerings: IBM System x, or perhaps IBM Power Systems, or new IBM PureFlex System.
Trying to compare IBM PureApplication System to Oracle Exalogic is like comparing latest generation digital SLR camera to the film camera. They both serve similar purpose, and in the end – you “might” be able to get similar results, but with huge differences in cost per picture, convenience, level of skills, and amount of time involved. I have switched to digital in 2003. How about you?

Read the full article with details on each issue here 

By Roman Kharkovski on July 12, 2012
From http://smarterquestions.org/2012/07/oracle-exalogic-%E2%80%93-the-emperor-has-no-clothes-part-2/