One of the most closely-watched legal battles in the enterprise storage market appears to have come to a tentative end this week after a jury ruled that Pure Storage Inc. must pay EMC Corp. $14 million for violating its intellectual property. The WSJ reports that the technology at stake was a piece of deduplicated software the latter company obtained through its acquisition of backup provider Data Domain Corp. back in 2009.

It’s one of three patents that EMC originally claimed to have been infringed by Pure Storage when its lawyers filed the lawsuit four years ago. Despite the legal team’s best efforts, the court decided that the other two were not in fact misused and cut the bulk of the $83 million sum that the storage giant sought as a result. The new $14 million ruling still enables the company to claim victory over its rival, but it’s not enough to achieve the lawsuit’s intended purpose of shaking up the competitive balance.

Pure Storage should be able to easily absorb the charge given that its sales stood at some $150 million in the last fiscal quarter, nearly three times the amount that was reported a year before. And the company has also braced for the likelihood that EMC may take advantage of its court victory to ask for an injunction that would ban sales of storage arrays violating its deduplication patent. Pure Storage general counsel Joe FitzGerald said in a blog post that his firm already has several alternative technologies “ready to go” in the event such an order is issued.

But while the patent dispute is now appears to be more or less behind the company, its legal team still has to another lawsuit from EMC to deal with that could potentially cost a lot more than $14 million. The vendor alleges that the more than 30 of its employees Pure Storage has poached over the past few years, including former chief marketing officer Jonathan Martin, were hired as part of an effort to obtain confidential information about its internal operations.

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