Just the closest /16 and a few friends.

Haha, not large at all! I've just built a couple of servers and their main responsibility is content storage and then content serving (transcoding). My main bottleneck right now is that I don't have 10Gbps switches (both servers have dual 10Gbps intel NICs ready to go). I have to do some throttling so that users don't experience any buffering issues.

Have you tried using a crossover cable and static IPs to link the two servers directly?

FYI if using modern hardware then you might not need a specific cable to try this thanks to Auto MDI-X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut...