The difference between working with the Node versus the Node Address is more apparent if your servers provide multiple services. If I need to take a server out for service, setting the node_address_state to STATE_DISABLED is less work than setting the state to STATE_DISABLED for each Node (where Node is a address:service pair) when your server provides multiple services.
Note that you can get/set multiple node_address_states (in version 4.5)with
- get_node_address_states
- set_node_address_states
These methods take a sequence of node_addresses.