you can use hpn-ssh (high performance) with aes128 (if your hardware has AESNI/padlock/etc) or rc4 (probably faster if your hardware lacks AESNI/padlock/etc) to eke a bit more speed over local connections on trusted lines. throw in compression and you can get good speeds.

rsync-to-rsyncd over a local link is probably faster though (requires more setup though).

You could probably just pipe tarballs through nc too. ;)