New version of Vegas allows pooled servers to assist rendering I believe.
Have the results been good ?

ie. sure you can render to AVI and then save time when doing the different bandwidth versions of RM , WMV,MPEG and MOV later

But this is still a long long long time.

So two or three servers could be a big boost.

But i am wondering if a hardware solution is possible.

There are lots of products here.
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/niagara/index.html

It would be good if some hardware could crunch all formats.