Abstract: A distributed interconnect may be employed in information management environments to distribute functionality, for example, among processing engines of an information management system and/or processing modules thereof. Distributive interconnects such as switch fabrics and virtual distributed interconnect backplanes, may be employed to establish independent paths from node to node and thus may be used to facilitate parallel and independent operation of each processing engine of a multi-processing engine information management system, e.g. to provide peer-to-peer communication between the engines on an as-needed basis. These and other features of distributed interconnects may be advantageously employed to optimize information management systems operations in a variety of system configurations.