The document summarizes the results of a proof of concept (POC) comparing the performance of an IBM Power8 system versus an Oracle Exadata X7-2 system for a customer's data warehouse workload. The POC found that while the IBM system was able to increase load speeds by a factor of four, this was achieved through maximizing CPU cores and using outdated optimizer settings, resulting in CPU bottlenecks and errors. In contrast, the Exadata system was able to match the IBM performance using fewer virtual CPUs and default optimizer settings, with low CPU usage and fast I/O times. Further optimizations to the problem queries allowed the Exadata to exceed the IBM performance levels while using fewer resources.