http://www.maatkit.org/ has a mk-parallel-dump and mk-parallel-restore
If you’ve been wishing for multi-threaded mysqldump, wish no more. This tool dumps MySQL tables in parallel. It is a much smarter mysqldump that can either act as a wrapper for mysqldump (with sensible default behavior) or as a wrapper around SELECT INTO OUTFILE. It is designed for high-performance applications on very large data sizes, where speed matters a lot. It takes advantage of multiple CPUs and disks to dump your data much faster.
There are also various potential options in mysqldump such as not making indexes while the dump is being imported - but instead doing them en-mass on the completion.