I'll fill in the missing

Yeah, we tried direct connection, also adjusted -par values and added a large -dbcache. Somehow on cpu usage it's only using one of the cores on xeon (out of

at 100%
Memory usage is steady at 4gb, there is 6gb available for datacoin.
This server runs only datacoind and no other processes. Steady 2-3kb network traffic that bounces to zero on each block. (we run all blade servers, so for datacoin i slided in a new blade just for this purpose)
Progess so far now showing that we are getting there, but awful slow ...

{
"version" : "v0.8.6.0-dirty",
"protocolversion" : 70001,
"walletversion" : 60000,
"balance" : 0.00000000,
"blocks" : 2181451,
"moneysupply" : 28860906.00783475,
"timeoffset" : -1,
"connections" : 7,
"proxy" : "",
"testnet" : false,
"keypoololdest" : 1516758393,
"keypoolsize" : 101,
"paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
"errors" : ""
}