Storage Vendors Lock Horns in Legal Battles

Seagate and STEC are the latest storage vendors to become embroiled in a patent dispute. Seagate announced that it is suing the Solid State Disk (SSD) specialist earlier this week.

STEC, in turn, says that Seagates claims are “without merit” and vowed to "aggressively pursue its defense to this infringement action" in a statement released yesterday.

In its third quarter earnings call last night, the Seagate CEO Bill Watkins had this to say about the dispute: ”The only comment I can say is that this is simply about protecting our $7 billion investment that we’ve made over the last 10 years, and research,” he said. “We have developed a lot of technologies in these application spaces and we’re going to protect it -- and we will protect it.”

It looks like another legal saga is about to begin, making this a good time to get an update on some of the storage industry’s other courtroom battles:

NetApp and Sun

NetApp and Sun hit the headlines last September when NetApp claimed that intellectual property Sun has released in its open-source ZFS (Zettabyte File System) software violates seven NetApp patents.Almost immediately, Sun went on the offensive, countersuing its rival with an injunction to remove all NetApp filers from the market.

NetApp’s last public statement on the dispute was an entry in founder Dave Hitz’s blog on Oct. 25 last year, when he described his frustration with Sun and its CEO Jonathan Schwartz. “We have tried to be very open, detailed and specific about how Sun is infringing our intellectual property,” he wrote. “It’s frustrating that Sun would just do a two-barreled blast, threatening to shut down our company.”

A spokesman for NetApp told Byte and Switch that there is “really nothing new that we can share with you,” when contacted earlier today.

Sun nonetheless appears keen to maintain the pressure on NetApp, filing another lawsuit against NetApp on March 26. “The filing is part of the response to the lawsuit NetApp originally filed against Sun on September 5, 2007 to forestall competition from the free ZFS technology,” wrote a Sun spokeswoman in an email, explaining that this relates to storage management technology NetApp acquired from Onaro in January.

Quantum and Riverbed

Quantum went after WAN optimization specialist Riverbed last year, claiming patent infringement on a de-dupe technology, just months after settling a patent dispute with Data Domain.Riverbed quickly struck back with their own counter-claim, seeking “treble damages for willful infringement” of one of its own data storage patents.

Quantum’s initial suit was dismissed on a technicality earlier this year by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but this doesn’t mean that we have heard the end of this dispute.

The "technicality" in question boiled down to a missing signature on an inter-company agreement, according to a Quantum spokesman. “We have re-filed the suit and that is pending in the Californian courts. We continue to feel very good about the strength of our case.”

Riverbed did not respond to a request for comment.

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