NetApp Hits Sun With Patent Infringement Lawsuit 217
jcatcw writes "Computerworld reports, "Network Appliance Inc. today announced that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. seeking unspecified compensatory damages and an injunction that would prohibit Sun from developing or distributing products based on its ZFS file system technology. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin, Texas, charges that the Sun ZFS technology infringes on seven NetApp patents pertaining to data processing systems and related software.""
Once again, the Patent Question to ask is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Arguing about patents won't change them (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing that matters here is whether prior art can be forund for WAFL.
Re:Arguing about patents won't change them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Original PDF and NetApp's explanation (Score:5, Informative)
And here is NetApp's boss blog: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/ [netapp.com] (quoted below):
This morning, NetApp filed an IP (intellectual property) lawsuit against Sun. It has two parts. The first is a "declaratory judgment", asking the court to decide whether we infringe a set of patents that Sun claims we do. The second says that Sun infringes several of our patents with its ZFS technology.
How did we get here?
Like many large technology companies, Sun has been using its patent portfolio as a profit center. About 18 months ago, Sun's lawyers contacted NetApp with a list of patents they say we infringe, and requested that we pay them lots of money. We responded in two ways. First, we closely examined their list of patents. Second, we identified the patents in our portfolio that we believe Sun infringes.
With respect to Sun's patent claims, our lawsuit explains that we do not infringe, and - in fact - that they are not even valid. As a result, we don't think we should be paying Sun millions of dollars.
On the flip side, our suit points out that Sun's ZFS appears to infringe several of NetApp's WAFL patents. It looks like ZFS was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem, with little regard to intellectual property rights. Here's what creators of ZFS have to say: "The file system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself, is WAFL
We filed suit against Sun because after we pointed out the WAFL patents, their lawyers stopped getting back to us. The first part of our suit is a declaratory judgment. It's complicated, but the basic idea is that Sun claims we infringe their patents, so we are requesting a trial to show that's not true. In essence, a declaratory judgment calls their bluff. It allows us to force a legal conclusion, rather than leaving this threat hanging over our heads. The second part is a complaint against Sun for infringing several WAFL patents with ZFS.
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The only people that get hurt is the consumer, who has to pay all these pathetic lawyers and their pathetic clients gazillions, either in protection money against this racket, or in court battles over ridiculous things like linked-list file systems and outrageously vague one-click patents.
The system is broke, and the w
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Put your magic wand away.
Hermione to the rescue! (Score:2, Funny)
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But I'm torn.. I've been looking at NAS,SAN boxes, mainly the StoreVault S500, or the Higher End Netapp 270, or a lower end Sun StorageTech 52xx for my work.. I hate patents, love ZFS, but not sure which one to order now! Guess I'll have to give Equallogic another call..
Re:Original PDF and NetApp's explanation (Score:5, Informative)
We recently began a deployment of a couple of NetApp filers, the 2040 and 3040 ranges. They are mighty great to work with from my experience so far. The software is very easy to use and understand and NetApp support has been stellar thus far. They move a lost faster than EMC from the looks although EMC's storage offerings are mighty impressive as well.
Storage is a rough business but the SAN I'm deploying this year paves the way for virtualized servers next year which I'm excited about. With VMWare's ACE I'm not even sure Tripwire is needed anymore.
Also it seems as though NetApp was rather nice about this whole patent thing from the get go. It wasn't until Sun threatened them that they acted and again acted fairly preferring a cross licensing deal rather than any cash payout in either direction.
Sun support in my experience has been a pain in the ass. I remember trying to modify the startup resolution on a box since I didn't have a Sun monitor or keyboard. They would not help me over the phone since it was a none Sun keyboard even though they had no problem with a non-Sun monitor. I did a key mash to figure out the stop key on boot to get me in. That was the last time I played with anything from Sun. That was about 4 years ago. Mileage may vary but I've not heard anything positive more recently. I am a fan of ZFS though, I wish it weren't mired in this crap but Sun started the fight and attacked a gorilla. The reaction had to be expected.
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Re:Original PDF and NetApp's explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a nice story, but Sun is claiming the exact opposite actually happened, with NetApp trying to extort them over ZFS first. On a purely intuitive basis I'd say that sounds more reasonable, NetApp has much more to fear from ZFS than Sun had to gain by trying to extort some licensing fees.
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You may be right, I've been seeing conflicting reports on the order in which this happened. Honestly though NetApp has been thrashing the whole industry over the last few years, I don't see what they would have to gain by this. Between Oracle and GoDaddy alone there is an enormous amount of NetApp storage out there. NetApp also seems more forthcoming with their side of the story indicating at first glance at least that they have nothing to hide.
Naturally appearances can be deceiving though. I know my expe
Re:Original PDF and NetApp's explanation (Score:4, Informative)
According to the filing, this dispute originated with a claim by StorageTek, which was later bought by Sun (and Sun decided to continue to claim). Tracing the timeline, it's clear that Sun was trying to squeeze money out of NetApp before ZFS ever shipped.
It's also alledged, in the filing, that NetApp is more concerned about the fact that Sun is giving away ZFS and its snapshot IP, which NetApp claims are its own. NetApp was OK with letting ZFS use this technology, but not with Sun giving it away to everyone else via OpenSolaris.
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Sun support in my experience has been a pain in the ass. I remember trying to modify the startup resolution on a box since I didn't have a Sun monitor or keyboard. They would not help me over the phone since it was a none Sun keyboard even though they had no problem with a non-Sun monitor. I did a key mash to figure out the stop key on boot to get me in.
You bought a used and partial Sun system off the secondary market, then you thought Sun was supposed to automaticaly support you?
BTW: They key you needed was the "Any" key.
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No, it was a brand new Sun box, the school didn't want to pay for the extras since it was already absurdly priced. Also, unless you're doing a 100k+ deal with them they barely give you the time of day if you are lucky.
I wasn't saying that was necessarily true of all Sun support but I've heard a lot of problem run into road blocks with them along similar grounds. You have to have specific combinations of products despite using standardized interfaces so any keyboard will work since it's USB but for some re
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Dave's one of the founders, but he's not the CEO or president, he's an executive vice president, as per the NetApp executive biographies page [netapp.com].
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So, when Microsoft files a patent for "a software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer" [wikipedia.org] everyone is fucked. That's the problem: all
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No good way to opt-out. (Score:2, Informative)
Don't patents ever protect your good ideas?! In theory, they should, but in practice it doesn't usually work that way. Suppose your small company wants to protect its ideas against a big company. Filing suit will accelerate the cross-licensing negotiation, and you'll probably end up paying. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. Patent battles between small companies work poo
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it depends on how they are used, in this case they're being used against their original purpose. instead of giving a company a small advantage in their market to encourage future research they're being used as M.A.D weapons. useful innovative combinations of software/code never get to be used because it's infringing on someone's copyright. patents are instead supposed to prevent one person/company from
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If this were a physical widget, it looks like Netapp would have a clear case. The question is whether or not the genuinely invented something and whether or not Sun has decided to take advantage of what presently belongs to someone else (namely Netapp). Was genuinely creative? Is Sun being a mooch?
These are real questions. The situation may be a bit more subtle than what a lot of the "knee jerki
Patents: Recoup investment (Score:2, Interesting)
Patents are a mechanism for recouping an investment into research, which may or may not pay off. For example, prior to the successful invention, an inventor may hav
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I would also add that if it is discovered that there was obvious prior art, that the comp
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Do you?
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Sorry. Patents are good things. Without patents, he who has money rules the world forever.
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As opposed to the situation now? He who has the money makes the rules, that's the system we currently use. Those with the most money have the most patents and can sue anyone into oblivion. Surely there has to be some middle ground here.
There's a difference between the concept of patents and the current patent administration in the United States. If we managed to implement the system that we originally had 200+ years ago, we'd be in much better shape. I haven't looked at the patents relating to this case, so I can't say for sure if they fall into this category, but getting rid of the truly obvious software patents (I'm looking at you, one-click purchasing) would go a long way towards fixing the system.
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I agree completely. Reducing patent lengths to say three years which I believe was where it was originally would go a long way towards ending the problem. I think of course the same should happen for copyrights but I can see copyrights having a slightly longer possibly 7 year term although that seems too long for me.
I think everyone can agree that in it's current form the system has been polluted and no longer serves its intended purpose.
They can do that now! (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, let's say I have a revolutionary new programming language. Great stuff, but, ultimately, it will need a bunch of existing technologies to make it work. I'll need parse trees, string manipulations, code generation, and hey, why not an IDE, all of which are covered by a bazillion patents already.
So, if I bring my product to market, the best I can possibly hope for is a cross licensing agreement with a major player, and that in turn, means they can crush me. Or, they can work around my patent in some way, still get the feature, and crush me. Patents don't protect ideas, unless you have a lot of very good patent attorneys and those cost big bucks.
In the world of machines, this doesn't happen. If I invent a new kind of a screw, its pretty obvious that the screw is a patentable thing. But software doesn't exist at that level of componentry and most likely never will. It simply can't. Software wants to integrate and to some extent, that makes it unique from the physical world. You don't need to integrate a particular kind of screw into every single socket and with every single tool, but ultimately, with software, you do wind up having to talk to every kind of protocol, database, and GUI, and in doing so, you wind up flying into a hailstorm of patents.
Seriously, when's the last time anyone has actually checked to see if they infringe before they write something? Only a big company can really afford to do it. Face it, the idea of a little guy with a software patent is a myth, 95% of the time, and its simply not worth the cost to the rest of us - even if we work in a big corporation.
Re:Once again, the Patent Question to ask is... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't create the model or design, or come up with a means to do so, too bad, no patent. Ideas are simple. Making something of them is what patents are supposed to protect.
Software is not a physical thing. Why a need to patent? You really shouldn't be able to patent math or the way that you apply it. Copyright, sure, but not patent.
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I'm not so sure that's true. What about the brilliant inventor who comes up with a very complicated system but has no capital with which to finance a prototype? Seems to me that patents would come in pretty handy in such a situation. Sans patent, you could spend five years searching around for independent financing while GE, which got wind of your idea somehow, has been working on developing it and refining it. Given five
How much does a patent cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
If he has no cash to build a prototype, how is he going to pay for a patent portfolio?
In the UK, it costs £200 to have a patent processed by the Patent Office, but there is an additional (approx) £3000 to have your patent drafted/checked by an agent against existing patents and translated into legalese. This £3000 is for each country that you want to apply for a patent. 20 countries, approx £60,000. Minimum. If you don't apply worldwide, the big guy, will simply take your patent and build and sell your product in the rest of the world.
Then, once you have your patent. The big guy sets his reverse engineering team on it, they find a slightly different way of doing the same job, and all your patents are useless. Go ahead, just try and sue that multi billion dollar organisation, see what happens to your house, job and family.
If you're a brilliant inventor with no money, you're pretty much fucked unless you can license your technology to a someone with deep pockets and who are reasonably honourable. Patents protect large organisations who can afford to roll them out worldwide... And patent lawyer's jobs.
They are not there for the small fry.
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What about the brilliant inventor who comes up with a very complicated system but has no capital with which to finance a prototype?
I think there are lots of precedents where industrials were waiting for the patent to expire before doing the implementation, so it's of no use for the inventor.
So, well, I don't think there's another practical solution other than finding someone to finance him (by employing him in a R&D department or by financing him).
BTW, in some countries there are innovation agencies (like Oseo [www.oseo.fr] (ex Anvar) in France), whose goal is to help those brilliant inventors and start-ups.
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So it is fair? Maybe not, but who again can say what is fair and what is not? If you don't have money to implement your idea, then strike down deal with company who does, eventually in agreeme
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How does the patent in this case "promote the useful arts and sciences."
Actually, I see NetApp as a great example of how patents on software can be useful. They developed some very unique ways of managing network-accessible data, and improved on the state of the art dramatically. Had the duration of their patents been reasonable for the industry (typically this means about 3-4x the period that it takes to get an idea developed and brought to market), then there would be no problem. The fact of the matter is that NetApp got those patents forever ago in this industry's timeline,
Re:Once again, the Patent Question to ask is... (Score:5, Interesting)
would have many of the features netapps WAFL has, and ZFS has now.
This filesystem was called Tux2.
He was quite sure that the patents NetApp had on this weren't valid,
because of prior art, and because his algorithm was quite
different and quite a bit smarter:
http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0010.0/
Yet somewhere in 2002, he gave up on Tux2, presumably due to pressure
from netapp: http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/8/26/138 [lkml.org] .
I wonder what will happen to BTRFS in light of this new NetApp
legal action: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ [oracle.com]
Mike.
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Companies like Rambus have given
oligopoly, you mean (Score:2)
You got patents? We got patents too! (Score:5, Funny)
How you like that?
Re:You got patents? We got patents too! (Score:5, Informative)
See, this is one of the things that's annoying about the term "intellectual property" -- it leads to people getting confused about what's what. Patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are all very different things, and have very different rules that apply.
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That's just about as right as saying that the term "fruit" "leads to people getting confused about what's what" [e.g. what's apple and what's an orange].
An apple has different properties than an orange. Still we need some superordinate term to refer to them collectively... as fruit.
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"Dismissed the patent", or dismissed any ability to enforce the patent after waiting until the defendants are more liable than they would have been had the Lemelson Foundation acted promptly? There's a big difference here, inasmuch as th
ComputerWorld Story Placement (Score:2, Interesting)
Bloggers paid based on traffic (Score:3, Insightful)
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Normally, I would jump on the editor(s) more than the submitter. If a submitter's is *less* interested in getting stories of interest to the community posted and more interested in pulling traffic to their site, then it is the editor's job to recognise this over time and take it into account in their decision. IMHO, anyway.
But in this case, Carpenter has decided to preach about the submission system. She has a conflict on interest in this regard - she wants fewer people to have a say in whether her stor
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I'm not sure why you have scare quotes in there. IDG does in fact own a number of magazines. ComputerWorld, PC World, PC Adviser, CIO Magazine and others are all print publications.
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A better article... (Score:5, Informative)
This actually mentions the specific technologies NetApp is alleging are infringed, and contains a link to the actual complaint, which lists the details of NetApp's allegations.
Cursory reading suggests these are somewhat reasonable patents--they solve non-obvious critical issues in terms of having data synchronized across multiple images. We're not talking about "One-Click Ordering" here.
That said, they filed in East Texas, which is a notorious district for patent trolling, which doesn't help them appear on the side of the angels IMO.
huh? (Score:2)
Copyrights, are enough. And even copyrights don't need to be life + 70 years.
This is insane.
Patents really should be limited to things like the Cotton Gin, or steam engine thrust arms. And , I think the patent office should go back to demanding scale models of those things.
Ugh
Sounds like the article misrepresents the facts... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds more like both Sun and NetApp are infringing on each others patents, and Sun simply wanted to formally resolve this in order to be on the safe side. This article seems awfully one-sided though, and the way the quote is paraphrased, it looks like the author is more interested in dragging Sun's name through the mud than presenting the facts.
Re:Sounds like the article misrepresents the facts (Score:2)
Well. Not sure of the timeline of events, but the open sourcing of a cross licensed thing is often directly at odds with what the cross license is envisioned to do: create a cartel.
C//
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You make me sick.
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...which actually use at least some of the technologies they've patented (e.g., WAFL and row-diagonal parity). (A quick look at the titles of patents assigned to "Network Appliance" shows a bunch of patents for technologies I remember going into products. Patent squatters they ain't.)
Patent Pirate Venue - LUFKIN TX (Score:5, Interesting)
Lufkin is very long way from anywhere. I live in Dallas TX and Lufkin is a long 3hr 18m trip South and East from here. Yet Network Applications Inc is a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company. Both Sun and Network Applications Inc are based in California.
Formerly the haven for patent pirates was Marshall TX. The same thing is probably going on in Lufkin TX.
Check out this article. "A Haven for Patent Pirates In one federal court in East Texas, plaintiffs have such an easy time winning patent-infringement lawsuits against big-tech companies that defendants often choose to settle rather than fight."
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Software
May the company with the best case win,
Jim
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The Eastern District of Texas was a popular place for IP litigation because of its so-called "rocket docket" that accelerated trials and Patent Local Rules that forced disclosure of relevant information by both parties. Discovery in a patent case is an expensive enterprise. Not only do you have to prove conception of the invention, you have to disclose a
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Just kidding of course,
Jim
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You'd lose that bet. Lufkin's in the Lufkin Division of the Eastern District of Texas [uscourts.gov].
Ancient ext3 history (Score:4, Interesting)
At least Sun has the means to defend itself.
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I was wondering when this would happen. (Score:2)
Apparently (Score:2)
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Perhaps both sets of patents could be invalidated, then. I suspect very much that somewhere someone developed a database technology with copy-on-write with an advancing root block; I don't, however, have actual knowledge of that. It's just based on the pattern of database technology trickling down to filesystems and memory storage.
Snapshot-capable file systems invented by whom? (Score:2)
Re:Apparently (Score:4, Informative)
Except that you are clearly ignorant about NetApp snapshots. They are very different from snapshots from other providers. I recently evaluated SANs from HP, EMC, and NetApp. NetApp was the most original and offered a lot of unique features including their snapshot technology. It's very non-obvious their implementation of it.
Here's a link to educate(PDF) [cosentry.com]
And another Bunch of white papers [zdnet.co.uk] explaining why Oracle went with NetApp storage. There is a similar list for GoDaddy
NetApp is not SCO, they are only acting because Sun threatened them. They are most innovative big company I've seen in recent years. Their WAFL implementation is pretty damned impressive especially when combined with Flexclone and their other Snapshot products.
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Nobody is claiming that NetApp invented snapshots. Well, nobody sane.
What NetApp did patent is a really elegant and efficient way to implement snapshots.
Read the patents ...
hmmm (Score:2)
But that won't happen. After all, trolling is all the rage these days.
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The only source of that is NetApp so far. It's very hard for third parties like us to find out what really happened. The only fact we really have is that NetApp brought out the big guns. Possibly for good reasons, possibly not, but either way it's certainly an escalation. I
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If "almost as long as" is defined as "about 2/3s as long as". Sun: 25 years [sun.com]. NetApp: 15 years [netapp.com].
My toaster is from 1999 (Score:2, Insightful)
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If ZFS seems to mimic WAFL, as I hear, I'd say that's a tribute to NetApp engineering, but NetApp is the Rodney Dangerfield in IT (no respect, I tell ya). I find it dishearten
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The same is true of Java Vs Lisp. Java was free from the start and easy to run on Windows (which most people use, even if they don't like it). Lisp popularity has started to pick up again since a
this suit will probably FUDdle... (Score:2)
The most compelling feature of ZFS is something that no storage appliance, RAID, or other self-contained subsystem can offer - end-to-end integrity.
Let's hope this doesn't chill Solaris 10 and ZFS adoption, because there's nothing else quite like it out there.
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I presume you mean something other than "they checksum blocks and store the checksums on disk" by "end-to-end integrity", because NetApp were doing that before ZFS hit the streets.
Sad but true.. (Score:2)
ZFS is a nice fs (even if the linux implementation is going to be sadly lacking).
Actually.. (Score:2)
Lot of corporate fud (Score:3, Interesting)
SUN says that NetApp tried to force the patents from them [sun.com] first and they boo-booed them.
Ah... we might not know who did what first, but I'm definitely annoyed that the lawsuite between two CALIFORNIAN companies is filed in TEXAS court by NetApp... no prizes for guessing that that court is a haven for patent trolls, so I'm more inclined to believe Sun's story here.
Lots of people saw this coming (Score:4, Informative)
Sun's CEO comments... (Score:2, Interesting)
[.snip-]
Thank You, Network Appliance
We held an investor and analyst conference today in New York City. All in all, a very positive day, lots of momentum and enthusiasm for where we're headed (and apprecation for the progress we've made - new product launches, and all).
In one of my first investor calls after the event, a large shareholder surprised me though, with, "why do you think NetApps is trying to kill off
Re:I'm kind of glad that Linux uses XFS, JFS and m (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a damn shame if development on it were halted because of silly patents.
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So, if the court in any way invalidates the various patents or weakens them, it improves
Re:I'm kind of glad that Linux uses XFS, JFS and m (Score:2)
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So lemme get this straight: a modern filesystem designed and engineered with a specific purpose, capability- and feature-set outperforms an older, more modestly-specced general-purpose filesystem designed with smaller volumes in mind in tests of such capabilities and feature sets?
Say it ain't so!
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And NetApp isn't a true innovator, and WAFL isn't truly innovative?
And IBM has been around a lot longer than StorageTek. Your point being?
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No. Go read NetApp's complaint [netapp.com], which enumerates the patents Sun claims NetApp is infringing and NetApp claims Sun is infringing, then look up the patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office patent search-by-number page [uspto.gov].