We are re-architecting our application and I want to confirm the following thinking and ask some questions please.

1. We will have multiple application servers, possibly JBoss 7 with timer/quartz triggered beans, and message-driven beans
2. Use Infinispan in client/server mode
3. Each Infinispan server would have a MySQL persistent store

Questions:

1. Doesn't the above present MySQL as a key=value store with elasticity properties? Obviously the MySQL-specific features are not available to the app.
2. Can we "freeze" an Infinispan instance so that the backing store (MySQL) can be taken offline without interrupting application clients? Backups and reboots being obvious reasons. Effectively the Infinispan instance would return NULL for items not in RAM, and cache changes to local disk until the MySQL backing store resumed.
3. Assuming distributed redundant data, when an Infinispan instance dies, will the remaining nodes rebalance themselves (into their own MySQL instances)?
4. If we know a rebalancing will take many minutes, but we actually just want to perform a two-minute reboot, can we freeze our application and tell Infinispan to close without rebalancing?

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.