Mining, Ethers and Private Ethereum Clusters

Hi - I am building a private Blockchain cluster DAPP envisaged to have 5 to 10 parties owning their own nodes (or node clusters). At this moment, there is no specific mandate to incentivise miners, though we would like to do so in future DAPP releases. In fact, the only reason mining is done is because there is no other option to validate and commit transactions onto the Ethereum Blockchain. In this context - a.) What good are the Ethers that are produced due to the afore-mentioned mining? b.) Is this an Ethereum usage anti-Pattern, in that - am I doing something that Ethereum was not built for. Aspects of Blockchain such as Immutability/ decentralized ledger / P2P nodes / Encrypted data : all of these are very germane to the work that I am doing, in that sense - Ethereum is a good fit. So, happy to hear comments .. Thanks