Your missing what I said. What if the cache continues sending WCCP packets, but the cache itself has died?
i don't think i am -- i would assume that the cache design would perform suitable sanity checks prior to sending out a heartbeat. if the design is sound, the cache would not be capable of sending out WCCP packets if it has 'died' in some way.
I am sure someone could make the argument that if the cache were designed suitably, it wouldn't need to send out packets because it wouldn't die in the first place. Or further, wouldn't need load balancing from a switch because it would have a suitable mechanism of capacity planning the traffic itself. I can think of an example where the disk might partially fail and WCCP packets would still be sent out. But of course, no one implements technology today before its been thoroughly matured with a million years of uptime. -Deepak.