Oracle ORION is a powerful tool for evaluating realistic OLTP and DSS/DW I/O performance.  ORION should be a part of every Oracle professional’s toolkit for build QA and performance tuning.  I’ve previously used it on this blog to show the performance of Amazon’s hi1.4lxarge SSD-backed instances and newer hs1.8xlarge instances with 117GB of RAM and 48TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives.

If you’re interested in running ORION benchmarks on AWS in an automated fashion, you might find the gist below useful.  It will download ORION, configure the disk layout file necessary to run ORION tests based on attached, non-root storage, and then execute the test.  You can throw this in the EC2 user-data script and add test result uploading to get fully automated results.