* Alacritech accuses Microsoft of patent infringement
In a court ruling that could potentially have a major impact on both Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming release of Longhorn, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco has issued a preliminary injunction barring Microsoft from releasing a networking technology known as Chimney.
Last August, Alacritech sued Bill Gates & Co., claiming patent rights on two pieces of technology used in Microsoft’s Chimney TCP Offload Engine (TOE) design. Alacritech claims to have demonstrated this technology to Redmond in 1998, but was rebuffed both when offering a partnership deal at that time as well as a licensing deal when Chimney was announced.
Chimney was originally slated for the late 2004 release of the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003 but this has never seen the light of day. The last blurb from Microsoft dated May 4, 2004 ( https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/news/bulletins/ws03net.mspx) described the Scalable Networking Pack as:
“[A] breakthrough networking technology that for the first time enables TCP Offload Engines hardware to be deployed while maintaining application and network management compatibility. The Pack will be useful both to customers receiving new servers with TOE NICs, and to customers who have older servers and are interested in extending the lives of the servers by adding a TOE NIC and the new Microsoft software.”
A TOE moves the management of TCP data transfer, including acknowledgement processing and TCP segmentation and reassembly, from the server’s CPU to a processor on the network interface card (NIC). It’s expected that Gigabit Ethernet industry leaders will release NICs to support this technology.
An additional technology, Receive Side Scaling (RSS), is slated for Longhorn. (RSS relied on Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003 showing up on time.) RSS enables the receive-processing of networking traffic to be load balanced across multiple CPUs by the processor in the NIC. It will purportedly dynamically balance the load based on variations in the system load as well as variations in the network traffic patterns. This is also alleged to be covered by the Alacritech patents.
We hope that Microsoft moves quickly to resolve these issues, as the potential for these technologies to address the increasing network traffic bottleneck is huge.
