Probably the single most important thing to help achieve good throughput over a high-speed network is the correct setting of the TCP window size. This controls the amount of data that can be "in flight" between the two hosts. The default settings that exist on current hosts are too small to take advantage of high-speed networks and will throttle back the host unnecessarily.
For details on TCP windows including instructions on setting the TCP window size see my User's Guide to TCP windows.
There are also other architecture specific stuff that can be very important. These include buffer allocation methods and methods of delivering the data to the operating system