Originally Posted by Brad Gosse

Mainly for Compressor encoding. It helps with HD but it's also a big help when you have thousands of hours of video to compress into many clips in different formats. It essentially breaks each vid up into as many equal parts as you have machines and let's each one process that chunk, the management app does all the work of splitting it up and re-assembling it.

They are on a gigabit switch and each one has 2 gigabit NIC's connected maximizing throughput between machines.