UPDATED 14:22 EDT / OCTOBER 19 2016

INFRA

Dell settles EMC’s patent dispute with Pure Storage

Dell Technologies Inc. is still tying up loose ends a month after completing its historic acquisition of EMC Corp. for $67 billion. Today, the technology giant took another item off the checklist by agreeing to settle a long-running patent dispute between its new storage subsidiary and Pure Storage Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

The move puts an end to three years of bitter litigation that started in November 2013 when EMC accused its rival of violating five patents related to managing, compressing and ensuring the integrity of data kept on storage arrays. Its lawyers took one the claims out of the suit shortly after filing the paperwork, another was dismissed by the court that oversaw the case some time later and then a jury crossed off two others. That left U.S. Patent No. 7,434,015, which covers a method for deduplicating information to improve capacity utilization.

The jury ruled in May of this year that Pure Storage unlawfully used certain elements of the technology and ordered it to pay $14 million to EMC. It had seemed like the dispute finally reached a conclusion, and the latter company even started preparing for the possibility that its competitor may ask for an injunction to ban sales of the infringing systems. But the accusation ended up getting dismissed by a judge on the grounds that Sun Microsystems Inc., which is now owned by Oracle Corp., patented a similar technology long before EMC did and thus effectively invalided its accusation. A re-trial was needed.

According to a brief press release issued by Pure this morning, it has agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to Dell in exchange for the “elimination of all litigation between the parties” along with a license to the disputed patent. Neither firm went into further detail on account of the deal being confidential.

Image via Pixabay

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