Patent ID: 8180901

Claim:
A method comprising: at a network element, receiving at least one of a plurality of packets of a plurality of network transactions from a plurality of clients over a first network for accessing one of a plurality of servers of a data center over a second network; terminating at least one of a plurality of a transport control protocol (TCP) connections of data streams at a network service module (NSM) associated with each of the network transactions at a central network point; storing meta-data for each of the terminated TCP connections in order to preserve session information, transaction information and packet information for each of the terminated TCP connections; assembling the data streams from a plurality of protocol data units of the plurality of packets, wherein the data streams are configured to be transported within the second network; transmitting the data streams over a switch fabric to an application service module (ASM) for layer 5 to layer 7 (layer 5-7) processing; routing the data streams without TCP information for application layer processing to one of the plurality of servers of the data center via a converged input/output (I/O) interface over the second network if the second network is a converged fabric network; performing the layer 5-7 processing at the ASM without having to terminate the TCP connections again; and routing the data streams with TCP information via a TCP connection to one of the plurality of servers of the data center if the second network is an Ethernet network.