Slightly off topic, but socat and lzop are my favorite utilities for shuttling data around a local network at high speed.

Backing up a disk:

    alice$ pv /dev/sda | lzop | socat - tcp:bob:1234
    bob$ socat tcp-listen:1234 - > alice.sda.lzo

Copying a bunch of files:

    alice$ tar c dir | lzop | socat - tcp:bob:1234
    bob$ socat tcp-listen:1234 - | lzop -d | pv | tar x