Patent ID: 7353276

Claim:
A network load balancing/external network interface node, for use in a system including multiple network load balancing/external network interface nodes, including bi-directional load balancing affinity with regard to requests from external clients and corresponding responses from internal network servers, the network load balancing/external network interface node comprising: an external network load balancing adapter that executes a load-balancing algorithm to determine whether a received client request is accepted by the network load balancing/external network interface node; an external network interface utility that processes the received client request and maintains state information associated with the received client request; an internal network load balancing adapter that ensures the network load balancing/external network interface node accepts a response from an internal network server corresponding to the received client request, the internal network load balancing adapter comprising: a complementary load-balancing algorithm to ensure that the network load balancing/external network interface node that processed the received client request processes the received server response, wherein the complementary load-balancing algorithm executes simultaneously on the network load balancing/external network interface nodes.