ORION (Oracle I/O Calibration Tool) is a standalone tool for calibrating the I/O performance for storage systems that are intended to be used for Oracle databases. The calibration results are useful for understanding the performance capabilities of a storage system, either to uncover issues that would impact the performance of an Oracle database or to size a new database installation. Since ORION is a standalone tool, the user is not required to create and run an Oracle database.
With the goal of closely mimicing the Oracle database, ORION generates a synthetic I/O workload, using the same I/O software stack as Oracle. ORION can be configured to generate a wide range of I/O workloads, including ones that simulate OLTP and data warehouse workloads.
A summary of how to use ORION is also available directly from ORION by invoking the “-help” option.
$ orion -help ORION: ORacle IO Numbers — Version 11.2.0.1.0 ORION runs IO performance tests that model Oracle RDBMS IO workloads. It measures the performance of small (2-32K) IOs and large (128K+) IOs at various load levels. Each Orion data point is a test for a specific mix of small and large IO loads sustained for a duration. An Orion test consists of multiple data point tests. These data point tests can be represented as a two-dimensional matrix. Each column in the matrix represents data point tests with the same small IO load, but varying large IO loads. Each row represents data point tests with the same large IO load, but varying small IO loads. An Orion test can be for a single point, a single row, a single column, or the whole matrix. The ‘run’ parameter is the only mandatory parameter. Defaults are indicated for all other parameters. For additional information on the user interface, see the Orion User Guide. ...output omitted...
ORION tool for various OS platforms and user guide can be downloaded from Oracle ORION downloads. Oracle offering this tool as a standalone download with an unsupported note. I just noticed, Oracle has included this tool in Oracle 11g Release 2; the binary is located under $ORACLE_HOME/bin.