Couple things come to mind; there may be others: 1) Avoid having to do an initial state transfer, which can be expensive if there's lots of state. 2) Avoid overhead of writing to a persistent store if you want to support recovering data that's been evicted. Note this is a less than perfect solution, as it's possible all nodes will evict the data, and thus it won't be recoverable. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4083992#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...