Question about how AppFabric's cache feature can be used.

I apologize for asking a question that I should be able to answer from the documentation, but I have read and read and searched and cannot answer this question, which leads me to believe that I have a fundamentally flawed understanding of what AppFabric's caching capabilities are intended for.

I work for a geographically disperse company. We have a particular application that was originally written as a client/server application. It’s so massive and business critical that we want to baby step converting it to a better architected solution.

One of the ideas we had was to convert the app to read its data using WCF calls to a co-located web server that would cache communication with the database in the United States. The nature of the application is such that everyone will tend to be viewing the same 2000 records or so with only occasional updates and those updates will be made by a limited set of users.

I was hoping that AppFabric’s cache mechanism would allow me to set up one global cache and when a user in Asia, for example, requested data that was not in the cache or was stale that the web server would read from the database in the USA, provide the data to the user, then update the cache which would propagate that data to the other web servers so that they would know not to go back to the database themselves.

Can AppFabric work this way or should I just have the servers retrieve their own data from the database?