As Manik said, this links very nicely to my suggestion to be able to define regions based on regular expressions http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBCACHE-1122 where all nodes matching a regular expression are part of a region and belong to a specific PartitionGroup. You could then differentiate between structural nodes and data nodes and define how many copies of each region should be in the cluster? with data nodes backup requirements being more important than structural ones? Regardless, I'm gonna link JBCACHE-1122 to JBCACHE-60 so that we have it in mind. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4063070#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...