Monday, April 14, 2014

Dell, Power Management Enterprises Settle suit over Cache Memory Patents

Case Filed: Aug 19, 2013

Case Closed: Apr 08, 2014

Court: Texas Eastern District Court

Judge: Rodney Gilstrap

Case Summary:
Texas-based patent holding company, Power Management Enterprises (PME) accused Dell of violating patent rights claiming that Dell have infringed two of its patents covering management of computer memory systems and preventing data loss.  It also filed seven other suits in the Eastern District of Texas against companies such as Toshiba, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, etc.

The asserted patents include US5895488 entitled ‘Cache flushing methods and apparatus’ and US5895485 entitled ‘Method and device using a redundant cache for preventing the loss of dirty data’ and were issued on Apr 20, 1999. The patents are scheduled to expire[i] by Feb 24, 2017 and are currently assigned[ii] to PME (source: MaxVal’s Assignment Database).

The ‘488 patent describes a method and device for managing a cache containing data that has not been committed to persistent storage. The ‘485 patent describes a method and device using redundant cache for preventing the loss of data that has not been committed to persistent memory.

The complaint alleges that Dell, manufactures, uses, offers for sale, or sells disk storage systems, including the Dell PowerVault MD3000 storage array that practice each limitation set forth in at least claim 6 and 8 of the ‘485 and ‘488 patents, respectively. The suit sought the Court to award damages to PME in an amount including pre-judgment and post-judgment interest.

The parties announced to the Court that they have reached a resolution in this action and filed a notice to dismiss all the claims and counterclaims with prejudice. The Court considering the request granted the dismissal with each party incurring their own costs and expenses.

All the other suits filed by PME asserting either the '488 patent alone or both the patents were also dismissed with prejudice.

See 2:13-cv-00639 for more details. To get alerts on cases filed/closed, subscribe to our Litigation Alerts.

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[i] Expected expiration date. Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents
[ii] MaxVal offers Patent Assignment Alert service where subscribers receive email alerts when assignments relating to target applications, patents or entities of interest are recorded.

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