Several folks recommend that you skip ssh because encryption will slow you down. Modern CPUs may actually be fast enough at 1Gb, but OpenSSH has problems with its internal windowing implementation that can drastically slow you down.
If you want to do this with ssh, take a look at HPN SSH. It solves the "other problems"windowing problems and adds multithreaded encryption. Unfortunately you'll need to rebuild ssh on both the client & server.