Orion IO Test Tool

I ran across Orion in a Kevin Closson blog post. From the OTN site:

"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. "

The download is on OTN here. (DMann 08-APR-2015 Download link not working - I have seen in OTN posts that an SR may need to be submitted to get access to this software).

I am looking forward to giving this tool a spin and will report back when I do. All I know is I wish I knew about this tool a few weeks ago. I proved that a client's supposedly 'identical hardware' was not... the hard way, by restoring a database to the questionable hardware and showing that I/O behaved very differently on two machines - this tool looks like it might have helped me prove that with a lot less work.

-Dave

Update: Luca Canali at Cern has been kind enough to post his experiences with the Orion tool here.