Patent ID: 7739398

Claim:
A load balancing accelerator, comprising: an input interface which received packets directed to a load balancer, the load balancer and the load balancing accelerator being separate from one another; a table which lists packet groups and their respective destination servers, the table having physical entries which can accommodate different field sets for storage of data entries; a comparator which compares at least one of the packets directed to the load balancer to one or more of the data entries of the table; a forwarding unit which forwards at least one of the packets for which a match was found by the comparator, directly to a server, responsive to the contents of the matching data entry; and a controller which determines in which field set, from the plurality of different field sets, each of the data entries of the table is stored; wherein the controller comprises a user interface through which a user may configure the field sets in which the data entries of the table are stored.