Less than a month after being hit by a lawsuit from EMC for allegedly colluding with former employees to steal inside information, Pure Storage is firing back at the storage giant with a complaint of its own.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of flash arrays denies the charges and accuses Joe Tucci’s company of unlawfully obtaining one of its boxes in an attempt to learn trade secrets. Pure Storage claims that a Massachusetts system integrator helped ship the machine to the Valley headquarters of EMC’s XtremIO division, where it supposedly underwent extensive testing and was “damaged to such an extent that it could not be reused or resold” as a result.

Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen further noted in a blog post that “it is no coincidence this comes at a time when the storage industry is poised for the most disruptive change in decades, as $15B annual spending shifts from performance (oxymoron) mechanical disk to solid-state flash,” adding that “We did not initiate these disputes, and our goal is in no way to impede EMC’s go-to-market efforts. Our aspiration is only that in Pure’s ongoing competition with EMC, both companies behave ethically and lawfully.”

EMC responded to Pure Storage’s counter-complaint in a matter of hours, accusing the startup of violating five patents covering innovations in deduplication, error correction and scheduling read and write operations for solid-state storage.

NetApp, one of EMC’s largest competitors, is also caught up a legal feud with a smaller rival. The vendor claims that Nimble Storage, a maker of hybrid arrays, lured former staffers to “join the company and to take NetApp confidential information with them” in violation of their contractual obligations and post-employment restrictions.