Patent ID: 8843634

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining, in a memory of a network application traffic management device, a partition pattern and a policy action, wherein the partition pattern defines a partition hierarchy comprising at least one variable entry at one or more levels of the partition hierarchy; allocating, at the network application traffic management device, bandwidth to data flows traversing the network application traffic management device according to the partition hierarchy; applying at least one policy action to a data flow to identify a partition name, wherein the partition name comprises a plurality of partition identifiers arranged in a hierarchy; and applying the partition pattern against the partition name creating one or more partitions in the partition hierarchy by, in part, accessing a database against one or more attributes of the data flow to resolve the at least one variable entry at the one or more levels of the partition hierarchy and identify node names corresponding to the at least one variable entry, and substituting the identified node names for the variable entries in the partition pattern.