7,000+ Active Geoserver Layers?

In considering our objective of adding map data from remote sites via WMS it occurs to me that at some point such model could fail in certain situations. The example that sticks out is data set volumes. With 7,000+ data sets to publish at Harvard, there are bound to be circumstances where a remote WMS request will return empty data if a Geoserver instance has lost it's connection (or a coverage store becomes corrupt) to ArcSDE. In cases like this we should think about intercepting the request and if a particular data layer needs "correcting" in Geoserver, we should utilize the REST capabilities to correct connection issues.