multicast sysimage restore

Hello Forum,
To save and deploy system images, for years now I have been using backup()/restore() for UFS and ntfs-3g's ntfsclone/ntfsimage for NTFS. I sometimes piped these tools through ftp() to save to a server folder or deploy from there. Or mounted a network share to backup to or restore from.

Recently I have more and more need to deploy the same system image onto multiple computers at the same time. And if I start restoring on multiple computers concurrently using this same technic then they slow each other down significantly. So I started wondering if there are any tools in our ports collection I could use to deploy system images via multicast.
Think about PowerQuest's Drive Image or Norton's Ghost in the DOS world as an example. With these, one started the receivers on the target computers, which then began to wait for the sender to start multicasting the image data. Once you had enough receivers ready, you could start sending.
Do you know any tools in the ports collection that could be used to add such multicast possibilities to restore() and ntfsimage()? Or should I look into the networking capabilities of a particular shell to achieve this?

Ideas, suggestions and pointers are welcome!
 
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