Systems Management

It looks like in Kace 7, it is possible to link appliances.  Can someone give a detail of what exactly linking the appliances does?

We are currently using 1 appliance mainly for doing inventory and patch management, and all other functions.  We are planning on using the service desk part of the appliance, however we are hesitant to put it on our current production appliance -- we have more than 9000 clients.  Already we are sometimes seeing some slowdown when we try to do some reports.  In any case, the the linking feature of Kace 7, I was wondering if it is possible to set up a new appliance just for using the service desk, and then if we can have that service desk appliance be able to collect device inventory data on demand whenever it is needed for the service desk tickets?  How does the linking work?  Would the service desk appliance do any caching in case it needed to get the data again?  Or does it always have to maintain a communication with the production appliance to get data each time it is called upon?

Please advise.  Thank you.