SAN JOSE, CA - Alacritech Inc., the innovator of Dynamic TCP Offload data acceleration solutions that enable the highest performance and efficiency in networked systems, announced on Thursday a US District Court granted Alacritech’s motion for preliminary injunction against Microsoft Corporation.
According to a press release by Alacritech, the Court order prevents Microsoft from making, using, offering for sale, selling, importing or inducing others to use Microsoft’s “Chimney” TCP offload architecture slated to be available in both the “Longhorn” version of the Windows operating system and in the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003.
Alacritech sued Microsoft in Federal District Court on August 11, 2004, alleging that Microsoft’s existing and future operating systems containing the “Chimney” TCP offload architecture uses Alacritech’s proprietary SLIC technology architecture.
The suit is based on two of Alacritech’s fundamental patents relating to scalable networking, US Patents Nos. 6,427,171 and 6,987,868, both entitled “Protocol Processing Stack for Use with Intelligent Network Interface Device.”
“After Alacritech discovered that Microsoft Chimney is based on intellectual property that we developed, patented and own, we offered Microsoft a license,” said Larry Boucher, president and CEO, Alacritech Inc.
“Microsoft rejected licensing terms that would be acceptable to us. We were forced to sue Microsoft to stop them from continuing to infringe, and inducing others to infringe, on our intellectual property rights. We are very pleased with the Court’s decision in this matter,” Boucher pointed out.
As the innovator of Dynamic TCP Offload technology that enables scalable networked systems, Alacritech has been issued sixteen patents covering the fundamentals of network data placement, protocol offload, protocol acceleration and file cache offload.
