UPDATE: Solarflare Sues over Patent Infringement, Exablaze Denies Accusations

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, claims that Exablaze's ExaNIC network interface card and Exasock kernel bypass sockets acceleration library infringe US patents 8,116,312 and 8,817,784, both covering the method and apparatus for multicast packet reception; 8,645,558, covering the reception of data via data transfer protocol to multiple destinations for data extraction; and 9,258,390, covering reducing network latency.

Announcing the lawsuit, Solarflare chief executive Russell Stern, said "Solarflare invests significant time, money and intellectual capital in engineering unique and valuable products that bring significant return to our customers. It is crucial for our business that we safeguard these investments, therefore we will vigorously protect and defend our intellectual property by all means available when an outside company clearly infringes our work."

Exablaze officials say the vendor is surprised by the lawsuit, and only learned of it after seeing Solarflare's press announcement.

"Never, during the three years of Exablaze's successful operations, has Solarflare ever contacted us, complained about our product, nor alleged any kind of infringement. We will vigorously defend any such allegations," says Exablaze chairman Dr. Greg Robinson in a statement, adding that the ExaNIC X10 card delivers almost half the latency of Solarflare's comparable product. The statement also notes that its current network cards are the fifth generation of NICs designed and built by the company and its parent since 2007.

Exablaze is no stranger to patent lawsuits: The vendor was spun out of Australian high-frequency trading firm Zomojo─which originally developed the NIC to use in-house to support its high-frequency trading strategies─in May 2013, after Zomojo successfully sued Zeptonics, an Australian low-latency technology vendor set up by a former Zomojo director, for stealing its technology.

"In the past we have ourselves been forced to, very successfully, protect our own IP interests, and as a consequence, we go to great lengths to ensure that our technology is our own and that we respect the rightful claims of others," Robinson says.