Systems, methods, and storage media for simulating real-world IO workload for testing a parallel and distributed storage system are disclosed. Exemplary implementations may: identify real-world data from a deployed production environment; simulate a workload by using the original directory tree structure and the original metadata from the files and replacing the original contents of the files with dummy content to create dummy files; write the directory tree structure and dummy files to a system of storage devices; read data from the directory tree structure and dummy files on the system of storage devices; and verify the integrity of the dummy files over the course of a plurality of data management processes and a plurality of data availability processes employed by the storage system.