Patent ID: 9692676
Date: 2017-06-27
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. A network element comprising: a plurality of server blades coupled together in a manner that allows any of the server blades to be designated a control server and one or more of the other server blades being designated as application servers, wherein one server blade is selected as the control server, and the control server is capable of communicating with each application server to acquire state information about each application server; and a switch in communication with each server blade, the switch being configured to obtain state information relating to the application servers and direct an amount of data traffic it receives to each application server based upon the state information obtained about each application server, wherein the switch is further configured, in response to a computational load of the switch exceeding a predetermined amount, to offload to the control server for the control server to perform, a computational process of performing a health check on the application servers to obtain state information of the one or more application servers, and the switch is further configured to receive the state information of the application servers from the control server and direct data traffic it receives to each application server based upon the received state information of each application server.