So when your legs stop working and you start crawling around the floor with your hands pulling the rest of your body, is that plasticity too?
It's easy to continue working at increased costs when you don't have a cache. That's.. that's what a cache is for; it's not critical to the infrastructure, it's here to reduce the costs.
Not to rain on any parade of course, I'm just pointing out I'd like to see more cases of actual plasticity of an email server that puts all jobs on hold while it temporarily takes over for a database server that just stopped responding.