Is it possible to use Django with an API as its back-end?

Hello fellow Django enthusiasts! I'm a new Django user, and have been
experimenting with 1.2 for the last few weeks. Thus far, I love it!
I love that it has thus far been so simple for me to learn, that the
documentation is actually readable and simply written, and that the
set up was sooo fast and painless.

As an interesting stroke of good fortune, it turns out that my
employer is currently evaluating new technology stacks as we plan the
complete rewrite of our current site. The site does ~16m uniques a
month, and we are looking to break the big features of our site into
stand-alone apps that utilize our new homegrown API (rather than
interacting with a database directly). I've been charged with
evaluating Django as a potential solution, but I'm having some trouble
tracking down information about the following two concerns:

1) Is it possible to run Django's models on our API, rather than
having its models interact with the database via the ORM (thus
replicating data as seen here: http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/Integrate_Web_APIs_into_Your_Django_Site)
2) What kind of performance should we expect (Django 1.2/Apache/MySQL
versus something like Zend Framework/Apache/MySQL)?

Any information, or nudges in the the right directions would be much
appreciated!

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