Run cron on a different web server?
This would be very easy to do by either running a run cron job or a jenkins job on the server/node you want to run drupal cron on.  This is very common practice in all of our projects.  

If you are doing a large data import on cron, be sure you are using cron queue. http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21system%21system.api.php/function/hook_cron_queue_info/7