Patent ID: 7552262

Claim:
A method comprising: transitioning an operative standalone router into a first component of a multi-chassis router while continuing to operate the standalone router in a standalone mode, wherein the transitioning comprises: incrementally replacing standalone switch cards within the operative standalone router with multi-chassis switch cards; forwarding a portion of network traffic to a second component of the multi-chassis router via one or more of the multi-chassis switch cards during the incremental replacement; and receiving the portion of network traffic from the second component via the one or more of the multi-chassis switch cards, wherein the standalone router is a core router in a service provider network, wherein the portion of network traffic is a first portion of network traffic, the method further comprising: receiving the network traffic via the service provider network; forwarding the first portion of the network traffic to destination devices on the service provider network using the multi-chassis switch cards after receiving the first portion of the network traffic from the second component of the multi-chassis router; and forwarding a second portion of the network traffic directly to destination devices on the service provider network using the standalone switch cards.