It would be great if you could do it, but beware that you will be benchmarking a lot of overhead if you only plan to measure storage performance. Why not use ZODB directly ?
If I talk HTTP, it measures things fully - Python's interpreter lock will mean a storage system written in python will benchmark better without having to compete with ZServer, and vice versa for storage systems with non-pythonic bits.
Yes, you are right.
What filesystem does that use ?
No idea :-) Something log based that is very fast and handles huge directories happily. It also appears that another member of this list has an EMC Symmetrix box to test on, which I believe is the next (and highest) level up from a Netapp.
Mmmm... I heard that Network Appliance hired a couple of the SGI engineers that designed XFS ?
I've attached a prerelease alpha of zouch.py for giggles. Not even a command line yet, so you will need to edit some code at the bottom. The current settings generate about 360 directories and about 36000 files, and proceeds to make about 180000 reads. This bloated by test ZODB to just over 200MB and took about 2.6 hours attacking my development Zope server from another host on my LAN.
Cool :) Thanks for writing this, it will be very useful for benchmarking. -Petru