Patent ID: 7139926

Claim:
A method for providing stateful failover protection between first and second routers, wherein said first and second routers provide load sharing among multiple servers in a server farm using network address translation, said method comprising: establishing, at the first router, session bindings between clients and the servers in the server farm; establishing, at the second router, session bindings between clients and servers in a server farm; at the first router, performing load sharing using Internet Protocol (IP) network address translation (LSNAT) between the clients and the servers in the server farm; at the second router, performing LSNAT between the clients and the servers in the server farm; exchanging session bindings between the first and second routers; and utilizing the exchanged session bindings at the first router to continue to perform LSNAT for session bindings that were established by the second router in the event of a failure of said second router; or utilizing the exchanged session bindings at the second router to continue to perform LSNAT for session bindings that were established by the first router in the event of a failure of said first router.