Patent ID: 7363353

Claim:
A network appliance to provide a plurality of different network services to a plurality of subscribers of a network data center, the network appliance comprising: a plurality of removable compute elements; and a switching fabric to forward data packets among the removable compute elements, wherein the plurality of removable compute elements include: a flow control element to receive a data packet having at least a source address, a destination address and a separate subscriber identifier; a removable compute element that executes a conversation handler that applies a policy configuration associated with a first subscriber of the data center to identify a first set of at least two network services to be applied to the data packet when the subscriber identifier of the data packet indicates that the data packet is associated with the first subscriber and that applies a policy configuration associated with a second subscriber of the data center to identify a second set of at least two network service to be applied to the data packet when the subscriber identifier of the data packet indicates that the data packet is associated with the second subscriber; a first set of at least two removable compute elements to perform the first set of network services, wherein the first set of removable compute elements are arranged in a first processing pipeline and a second set of at least two removable compute elements to perform the second set of network services, wherein the second set of removable compute elements are arranged in a second processing pipeline, wherein the flow control element uses the subscriber identifier contained within the data packet to identify the data packet as being associated with one of the subscribers of the data center, and wherein the flow control element directs the data packet to a first one of the removable compute elements of the first set of removable compute elements when the data packet is associated with a first one of the subscribers of the data center and directs the data packet to a first one of the second set of removable compute elements when the data packet is associated with a second subscriber of the data center.