Wednesday, ahead of finding out who its daddy was gonna be, 3PAR got sued by a little Austin, Texas outfit with a litigation trail behind it by the name of Crossroads Systems.
The publicly traded Texas company accused 3PAR along with six other storage houses of infringing on its router and data storage patents in the Western District of Texas court in Austin, according to the Austin Business Journal.
3PAR’s InServe Storage Servers and Inform Operating System allegedly flout two Crossroads storage router patents that describe virtual storage on remote storage devices.
Whether Crossroads wins or not – and it has succeeded in wresting settlements before – it’s just jacked up 3PAR’s price for HP by whatever the legal bills run now that HP has outbid Dell.
Ironically, Crossroads, which has various widgetry to connect, protect, secure and restore business-critical data based on patented core routing messaging interface (RMI) technology, seems to have gotten a global reseller deal for the healthcare market with Dell Services in mid-August and says on its web site that it’s got an OEM partnership with HP as well as EMC and Quantum.
Crossroads Wednesday also posted its third-quarter results showing product revenues of $884,000, down from $941,000 in Q2, and revenue from IP licensing and royalties of $2.3 million, down from $4.1 million sequentially. It lost $1.5 million.
The other companies sued include American Megatrends, Rorke Data, D-Link Systems, Chelsio Communications, DataCore Software Corporation and iStor Networks.
Crossroads’ widgetry includes DBProtector (database security), FileMigrator Agent (migrating files from servers to network-attached storage), ReadVerify Appliance (monitoring tape media and the condition of disk drives) and ShareLoader (protecting data on desktop and laptop PCs and in remote offices).
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