?? The benefits of Oracle's elastic Cloud and data warehousing are obvious, starting with the single vendor offering all the underlying components: Oracle's one-stop-all approach helps streamline licensing, support, upgrades, and consolidation, all handled by a single vendor. This may help prevent frequent vendors from blaming each other for technical problems. It is easier to configure, upgrade, and consolidate a single vendor approach, simplifying the contact and validation paths of these issues into a single portal for easy deployment.
Other benefits include optimizing performance, improving fault tolerance, and rapid deployment. However, these advantages can also be turned into a disadvantage. For example, a single-vendor solution usually means that you are locked in on the vendor platform, so it is difficult to migrate to another vendor. As far as Exadata is concerned, it is not necessarily that serious, just because the organization is likely to already have a commitment to run Oracle database. On the other hand, Oracle databases installed on Exadata systems can be moved to other hardware at any time, which mitigates the issue of single vendor locking if needed.
With the release of Exalogic, the single-vendor model is becoming more serious, simply because Oracle Exalogic locks in a variety of Oracle technologies, from Funsion middleware to JRockit, HotSpot. In this case there is no direct competitor.
Other drawbacks include price (hardware and software license), high cost of support contracts, and periodic upgrades. A multi-faceted solution?? Solutions, IT managers have more control over pricing, sizing, and other issues, but they will be forced to "self-integrate" multi-vendor solutions.
Because of the scale of processing, it is difficult to distinguish between competing solutions, especially those that are customized and non-customizable. However, some features of Exalogic and Exadata can be created using common rack-mount blade systems, high-performance storage area networks, and other vendors to deliver applications. Databases can be selected from a commercial database or an open source database, and OLTP capabilities can be provided by software vendors.