U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Reaffirms Quantum Patent

Quantum Corp. announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has notified the company of its intent to issue a reexamination certificate confirming the validity of the company’s 5,990,810 patent (the 810 patent), in the area of variable-length data deduplication. Deduplication greatly reduces the cost of retaining, managing and transferring data by eliminating redundancies in stored data. The reexamination of the patent resulted from a request initiated by a third party in May 2009.

"The USPTO’s action speaks to the strength of Quantum’s intellectual property in deduplication," said Shawn Hall, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary at Quantum. "Over the last four years we have leveraged our IP and technology advancements to become a leading provider of deduplication solutions that help customers meet the challenges of protecting and managing increasing volumes of data."

Quantum acquired the 810 patent through its merger with ADIC in 2006 and in early 2007 shipped its first DXi-Series disk-based backup and deduplication product.

Since then, the company has expanded its DXi portfolio, offering solutions for customers ranging from small and remote offices to large, global corporations. Most recently, Quantum announced DXi 2.0, the next generation software platform for the DXi-Series. Beginning with the latest generation small- and medium-size business (SMB) and midrange systems, DXi 2.0 will deliver high deduplication speeds available for any open protocol, inline appliance in their respective classes, doubling the performance over earlier generation DXi products with no change in price. In addition to providing deduplication for backup, Quantum has also incorporated the technology into its StorNext high-performance data management and archiving software for nearline storage.