Patent ID: 8832247

Claim:
A system comprising: a first object cache operating in a memory of a first apparatus in communication with a second object cache operating in a memory of a second apparatus via a transport and signaling channel comprising a reciprocal byte cache layer for the first apparatus cache and a reciprocal byte cache layer for the second apparatus cache, wherein, the reciprocal byte cache layers of the first and the second apparatuses are used by each of the respective first object cache and second object cache to communicate with one another to decide which cache will store various network traffic, the caching of network traffic being independent of an application protocol and an object level protocol, policy-based decisions are implemented at an application proxy layer associated with one or more of the first object cache and the second object cache, and the first object cache and the second object cache operate as a single cache that split processing and storage of objects between the first and the second object caches.