Patent ID: 7272746

Claim:
A redundancy architecture for network processing systems in a network, the network containing network traffic consisting of a plurality of data packets, the plurality of data packets forming a plurality of flows, the redundancy architecture comprising: at least a first network processing system operable to receive data packets from the network and further operable to send processed data packets back onto the network and including, a processing engine operable to learn and maintain state for particular flows, wherein the processing engine assigns an identifier to one or more of the particular flows and associates each data packet belonging to that flow with the identifier, the processing engine further operable to identify characteristics of one or more of the particular flows and to store those characteristics in a state database in the processing engine, the network processing system further including a network link; and a second network processing system which includes a second processing engine with a second database and a second network link connected to the network link and operable to allow communication between the first network processing system and the second network processing system; wherein the second network processing system is connected in parallel with the first network processing system and is operable to receive all the state entries from the first network processing system, such that when a failure occurs in the first network processing system the network traffic on the first network processing system is switched to the second network processing system.