Patent ID: 8131872

Claim:
A method, comprising: initializing a router based on one or more customer affinity definitions; receiving a transaction message at the router; determining whether the transaction message includes an affinity indicating an administrator-specified preference regarding processing of the transaction message and, when the transaction message includes the affinity, selecting a server system among a plurality of server systems to process the transaction message based on the affinity and based on a system affinity of the server system, wherein the system affinity specifies processing characteristics of the server system, and wherein the server system comprises a set of servers; modifying the transaction message to include an identification of the server system; routing the modified transaction message to a coupling facility; receiving a notification message from the coupling facility, wherein the notification message requests a server associated with or including the router to send a bid to process the modified transaction message; sending the bid to process the modified transaction message to the coupling facility; receiving authorization to process the modified transaction message from the coupling facility based on a timestamp of the bid; and processing the modified transaction message.