It's also painfully slow. I've been using it for the past few months, and it rescans my library every time I access it. Half the time it shows my libraries as empty. Overall it feels very unfinished.
With that said, using the Shield as the server greatly improved our previous streaming situation. Before using the Shield, we'd struggle to maintain two good quality streams at once, whether both were local or one was local and one remote. The previous server was no slouch: Core2 Quad with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, but it seems the Shield is well qualified to handle server duties.
The other concern the Shield mitigates is power inefficiency; that C2Q is a power hungry beast, and the entire Shield box uses less wattage at full load than the Intel CPU alone at idle.