Patent ID: 8804529

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, at an ingress port of a core switch of a first Data Center Ethernet portion of a network, a first frame from an Ethernet portion of the network, the first frame comprising a congestion management (“CM”) tag and a first destination address; determining that the CM tag indicates a first hierarchical media access control (“MAC”) address of a device in a second Data Center Ethernet portion of the network; determining that the first hierarchical MAC address matches a second hierarchical MAC address of the ingress port; modifying the CM tag to indicate that a second frame should be forwarded to the device in the second Data Center Ethernet portion of the network, wherein the second frame indicates the first hierarchical MAC address as a second destination address for the second frame and wherein the second frame comprises a backwards congestion notification (“BCN”) message; and forwarding the first frame to the first destination address of the first frame.