Radware Fixes Legal Guns on F5

Another day, another lawsuit.

Application switching firm Radware Ltd. (Nasdaq: RDWR) has filed a lawsuit alleging that F5 Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV) infringed one of its key technology patents.

According to legal documents filed by Radware with the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, the patent concerns a method for load balancing client requests among redundant network servers in different geographical locations. The Mahwah, N.J.-based firm received the patent in April this year (see Radware Gets Load Balancing Patent), and the technology has already been incorporated into the companys flagship Web Server Director (WSD) product, it says.

Now Radware is going after F5, claiming that its rival’s 3-DNS and Big-IP products infringe the patent. When contacted by Next-Gen Data Center Forum, a spokeswoman for F5 declined to comment.

In a statement released earlier today, Radware CEO Roy Zisapel said that the company had been forced to take legal action to protect its R&D investment: “Unfortunately, we learned that, in order to protect our intellectual property and our investment in R&D we must, in certain cases, resort to legal action."