Friday, December 19, 2014

Cisco Seeks ITC Exclusion Order Against Arista

Cisco has filed a petition request with the US International Trade Commission asking for an exclusion order to blocking Arista from importing and selling products that use Cisco’s patented technologies in the United States.

In a blog posting, Mark Chandler said the petition cites the same twelve patents asserted in Cisco's recently filed lawsuit against Arista.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/protecting-innovation-cisco-seeks-injunctive-relief


In response, Charlie Giancarlo, a former Cisco executive who now sits on Arista's Board of Directors, writes on the company blog that Arista "invented a new operating system and basically re-invented the switching market to become more software and merchant-silicon driven." He refutes any copying comparison to Huawei and quotes Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
http://www.arista.com/blogs/?p=1096


  • Earlier in December, Cisco filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Arista Networks, claiming that a dozen key switching features covered by 14 different U.S. patents held by Cisco were copied.  Specifically, Cisco's complaint cites the following technologies that are incorporated by Arista in their entirety into Arista’s products:
  • System Database (“SysDB”) (Arista uses Cisco’s networking device implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,162,537)
  • Zero-Touch Provisioning (“ZTP”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,290,164)
  • On Board Failure Logging (“OBFL”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No.7,340,597)
  • Control Plane Policing (“CoPP”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,224,668)
  • Spanning Tree Loop Guard(Arista uses Cisco’s implementations covered by Cisco Patent Nos. 7,460,492 & 7,061,875 )
  • In-Service System Upgrades (“ISSU”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation described by Cisco Patent No. 8,356,296)
  • Virtual Port Channels (“vPC”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No 8,051,211)
  • Access Control ListsImprovements (“ACL”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent Nos. 7,023,853 & 6,377,577)
  • Private Virtual Local Area Networks (“Private VLANs”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent Nos. 6,741,592 & 7,200,145)
  • Generic Command Interface (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,047,526)
  • CLI Command Data Translation (Arista uses Cisco’s implementatio