A small Massachusetts software company has sued Google, claiming that the search giant's brand-new Google Drive infringes one of its patents.
Unveiled little more than a month ago, Google Drive -- aka the "GDrive" -- is an online service for storing files and shuttling between various machines, local software applications, and other online services.
With its suit, filed on Tuesday and first reported by GigaOm, the Sudbury, Massachusetts-based SuperSpeed LLC claims that the Google Drive infringes on US patent number 5,918,244. Issued in 1999, the patent describes a "method and system for coherently caching I/O devices across a network." Basically, this system uses machine memory -- as opposed to hard disks -- as a means of storing data and sharing it across multiple machines.
"The cache keeps regularly accessed disk I/O data within RAM that forms part of a computer system's main memory," the patent reads. "The cache operates across a network of computers systems, maintaining cache coherency for the disk I/O devices that are shared by the multiple computer systems within that network."
SuperSpeed's suit does not specify how GDrive infringes the patent. But it appears that SuperSpeed takes objection with how Google handles data on the Google data center storage devices that underpin the service -- as opposed to the user desktops and notebooks that tap into the service.
SuperSpeed says that its patented software is designed to work with a cluster of disks that are shared across a network. "In this configuration, multiple computers can all communicate with each other and can all access data from the same data storage device or devices, such as hard disks," its suit reads. "For example, a bank might have hundreds of computers as part of its network, some for employees handling customer service calls, others for employees running credit checks for loan applications, and so forth. Each of these computers needs access to the bank's customer's credit card records, which are stored on a series of hard disks.
"A shared-disk cluster permits any one of the computers to communicate across the network with the credit card database on the hard disks, retrieve records for a particular customer, and make changes that will then be available to all other users on the network."
The suit seeks an injunction against the Google service and demands royalties.
Like most cloud-based applications, both Google Drive and Google Docs -- the company's file viewer and editor, also named in the suit -- tap into shared storage clusters set up in Google data centers.
The '244 patent was issued to a company called EEC Systems in 1999 and bought by SuperSpeed that same year. SuperSpeed could not be reached for comment. The last "News" update to its website, from 2005, discusses the company's win in a patent infringement suit against Oracle.
