Patent ID: 8364852

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a network management module, implemented in at least one of hardware or a non-transitory processor-readable medium, to associate each peripheral processing device from a plurality of peripheral processing devices, based on a zone assignment associated with that peripheral processing device, to be operatively coupled to a distributed switch with one access set from a plurality of access sets such that (1) the one access set is disjointed from the remaining access sets, (2) each peripheral processing device from the plurality of peripheral processing devices is prohibited from being associated with more than the one access set, and (3) each access set from the plurality of access sets is to include a first set of peripheral processing devices from the plurality of peripheral processing devices each of which is operable to send data to each peripheral processing device from a second set of peripheral processing devices from the plurality of peripheral processing devices via the distributed switch, the network management module to assign a contiguous block of addresses to each access set from the plurality of access sets such that each peripheral processing device from the plurality of peripheral processing devices included within an access set from the plurality of access sets is associated with a common address prefix, the network management module to send data associated with a filter defined using the common address prefix.