“You can do many things with Ant, one of them is the ability to use tools like tar, gzip, FTP and scp for remote deployment. At work, we use a shell script on our servers to deploy our apps, and we are using rsync to send the applications to the server before calling the shell script. Would be great to actually do this in one step ? It's quite easy!. …First, you need to install JSch. We use the jsch-0.1.29 release, we didn't try a later release. Copy the JAR into /Developer/Java/Ant/lib/ (Mac OS X 10.4) or /usr/share/ant/lib/ (Mac OS X 10.5).”

It is possible to use Ant to call, say, bash scripts (with <exec /> and <arg />) in case installing JSch is not interesting or possible.

[http://wiki.objectstyle.org/confluence/display/WOL/ Remote+deployment+with+Ant+and+ssh]