3Par faces third-party lawsuit as HP trumps Dell

Acquisition target is named in patent infringement case

3Par, which has finally been acquired by Hewlett-Packard after a protracted bidding war, is among a group of companies being sued by vendor Crossroads Systems for patent infringement.

Crossroads' products include storage routers and storage bridges, a database security appliance, virtual tape appliances, tape encryption and file migration software.

In a suit filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, the company alleges that 3Par, D-Link, Rorke Data, Chelsio Communications, DataCore Software, iStor Networks and American Megatrends infringe on its patent for a storage router that provides virtual local storage on remote storage devices.

The lawsuit names seven models of 3Par's InServe Storage Servers and the 3Par Inform Operating System as infringing on the patent. Crossroads says it has notified all the defendants that it believes infringe its patent but that they continue to sell the products at issue. Crossroads names an additional patent covering a similar technology that it says 3Par and DataCore also infringe.

3Par declined to comment on the suit Wednesday, and the other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.