Patent ID: 8861359

Claim:
A network system, comprising: a server which accommodates a plurality of tenants; a plurality of network appliances which has a resource shared by said plurality of tenants; a plurality of switches arranged between said network appliances and a network; and a controller which controls said plurality of the switches, wherein each of said plurality of the switches includes a flow table indicating an association of an input source and a transfer destination of packets for each flow, and transfers packets received from said input source to said transfer destination by referring to said flow table, and wherein said controller includes: an assignment control block which carries out a dynamic assignment process for dynamically assigning each of a plurality of tenants to any of said network appliances in response to used resource amounts of said network appliances, said used resource amounts including traffic transfer performances of said network appliances used by said plurality of tenants, the traffic transfer performances including rates of data transfer of said network appliances; a route design block which designs a flow route for each of said tenants so as to pass through said assigned network appliance; and a switch setting block which sets said flow table for each of switches along said designed route so that packets which belong to a flow related to each of tenants is transferred along said designed route, wherein the plurality of tenants, which are accommodated in the server, provides services, wherein the network appliances each execute a specific process for network traffic which passes through the network appliances, and wherein the plurality of switches are arranged between the network appliances and an external network, and the plurality of switches are connected to the external network via a gateway.