Importance

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Abstract

A new network load balancing/firewall node for use in a system including multiple network load balancing/firewall nodes is disclosed. The network load balancing/firewall applies bi-directional load balancing affinity with regard to requests from external clients and corresponding responses from internal network servers. An external network load balancing adapter executes a load-balancing algorithm to determine whether a received client request is accepted by the network load balancing/firewall node. A firewall utility processes the received client request and maintains state information associated with the received client request. An internal network load balancing adapter executes a complementary load-balancing algorithm simultaneously on each network load balancing/firewall node to ensure that the same network load balancing/firewall node accepts a response from an internal network server corresponding to the received client request.

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First Claim