“The mere fact that it was granted means it has been examined by the USPTO for prior art and was more than worthy to attain patent status,”
Yeah, right!
On 3 December, 2013, the US Patent And Trademark Office signed off patent 8,601,473, titled “Architecture for managing I/O and storage for a virtualization environment”. On Wednesday 5 March, 2014, the holder of that patent, Nutanix, popped out a press release and other material explaining it. The day of Nutanix's …
When it has 34 reference citations to prior art. Really, you are going to patent what is essentially an IP addressable VSA? Lefthand, Dell, Nexenta, VMware, HP, Netapp and several others may have something to say about that. Out of all the storage based companies out there today, Nutanix continues to be the one who has been most vocal in opposition to VSAN, probably because it takes away their entire value prop. Why pay a 4X premium for a supermicro chassis when you can buy a VSAN ready node from a host of different vendors?
Hubris is not becoming for technology companies, neither are transparent marketing parlor tricks.
Focus on your technology and not your competitors.
So this is a patent that has been granted for running the sort of abstracted IP-based I/O services that have been run on physical servers in one guise or another for many years, just on the basis that it is now being run on a virtual machine? That's absurd.
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It's about time that some other means was found of adjudicating what is, or is not, a patentable IT products than this charade that only serves to enrich lawyers and this sort of nonsense. Frankly the number of true IT innovations, rather than just natural developments of existing technologies, are relatively few. Perhaps what's required is an independent group of IT specialists who can draw up some vigorous guidelines and provide an early sifting service on what is truly innovative. There are peer-review systems for academic journals. Perhaps something in equivalent. It might cost more money in the first place, but is surely a more economic system in the long run than this apparent free-for-all in granting trivial patents.