This feature request is to expose a JMX operation on each node, to suppress state transfer for a period of time. This flag would be false by default.

The use case of this flag would be to ease bringing down (and up) a cluster for maintenance work. A typical workflow would be:

1) Shut down application requests to the data grid
2) Suppress state transfer on all nodes via JMX
3) Bring down all nodes
4) Perform maintenance work
5) Bring up nodes, one at a time. As each node comes up, disable state transfer for the node via JMX.
6) Once all nodes are up, enable state transfer for each node again via JMX
7) Allow application requests to reach the grid again.

The purpose of this is to allow smooth and fast shutdown and startup, remove the risk of OOM errors (when bringing a grid down).

This is a small but useful subset of full manual state transfer as defined in ISPN-1394.