Patent ID: 8549146

Claim:
A method in a load balancing site for stateless and dynamic load balancing of Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) data packets between a plurality of blades of the load balancing site and devices external to the load balancing site, wherein the plurality of blades are acting as one or more of clients and servers, wherein each of the plurality of blades has a blade identifier (ID) that uniquely identifies its location for routing purposes to a load balancer of the load balancing site, the method comprising the steps of: during establishment of server connections between different ones of the plurality of blades and the devices external to the load balancing site, each of the plurality of blades choosing for its SCTP verification tag a value that at least identifies its blade ID, wherein the SCTP verification tag is for verifying packets from a client to a server and also identifies the blade by way of the blade ID to the load balancer for routing the SCTP data packets of the server connections; and responsive to the SCTP data packets from the devices external to the load balancing site sent on established server connections, the load balancer performing the following on those packets: determining from the SCTP verification tags in the SCTP data packets the blade IDs; and forwarding each of the SCTP data packets to one of the plurality of blades according to the blade IDs, wherein reading the blade ID in the data packet to forward the data packet allows the load balancer to avoid storing and referencing a mapping table for routing the data packets of the server connections to the servers, wherein responsive to a failure of the load balancer, the load balancer performing the following step: relinquishing all packet routing tasks to a backup load balancer in the load balancing site, wherein the backup load balancer takes over all subsequent packet routing tasks of the load balancer, wherein the backup load balancer continues packet routing immediately because the backup load balancer does not need to receive state information from the load balancer for the packet routing.