Turning SEPM servers back on

I’m looking for some advice.  We have a SEP 11 environment with about 8000 machines on it.  We had our revisions set to 15, which gives us about 5 days worth of definitions.  During the recent storm, we needed to keep as much bandwidth available as possible, so we turned off the SEPM servers to stop the clients from getting antivirus updates to save bandwidth.

Now we are that point where we need to turn the servers back on, but we are worried about all of the clients calling into the server and downloading a full definition set and crippling our network.  What is the best way to handle this situation?