Is it necessary to have more than 1 rip?

I don't know for sure that it is necessary, but wow it sure helps.

We just recently ran a job with hundreds of 250 -360 mb postscript files containing 5000 pages or more of variable data. Rip times were fractions of the time on all other rips I have seen (Creo Spire, Fiery, DocuSP).

I am curious if it is one of those types of things that you can justify adding at a later date or if you just need to get it at the beginning.

I hope that eventially normalizing can be distributed to other rips. Having the primary as the only machine that can normalize is a small bottleneck.