Render Farm

It might be worth asking jamie(1337) I'm pretty sure he's mentioned having one/having knowledge of one in the past.

I know there's a way to split rendering processes in After Effects and maybe premiere, and there definitely has to be a way for Maya to do it as it's a pretty high end piece of software.

As for your render farms, you're going to need a few stations with gigabit ethernet and decent ram/cpu specs. I looked into it myself a little just for the hell of it, it's a pretty interesting but certainly not cheap concept. I'll try to find some links I stumbled upon and reply in a bit

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/render-farm-node,2340-6.html

Wicked! Just sent relayed this stuff to my co-worker, thanks a million man!

For maya it depends on your renderer. If your using mentle ray then it fairly simple. Maya ships with a back burner license and back burner is the software you use to distribute the renders. You have a back burner server and manager. Each of your render machines is a server and you use the manager on which ever computer you want to distribute from. From the manager you can set the chunk size for each serve to work on. You can connect the machines through a network and render the images to a single internal drive or a network. However remember you need a license of maya on each render node not just back burner.

If your using renderman then there is tractor which does the same.

Arnold has its own but I don't use Arnold.

Vray I'm not sure about I use it but just for stills so never needed to distribute renders.

What is worth considering though us weather you need your own farm or weather an online farm I cheaper. Once you cost up the machines, downtime of those machines, software licensees, power comsumption ect it may work out cheaper to render via an online tender farm.