Linux admin needs ruby/shell-scripting help

Need to automate the pulling down of some processes and logs. The perl script has become horrid. I'm starting to rebuild it in ruby and it's going well, but I see that capistrano can supposedly do multiple ssh logins at once.

This would speed up the script quite a bit, because I'm dealing with about 300 servers.

Can I make capistrano do this? It's built for rails and I don't care about rails, so if someone could help me translate cap's functionality into what I'm doing, I'd be greatly appreciative.

Or a different way of doing it entirely.