Within hours of 3PAR maybe finding out who its daddy's gonna be, it got sued by a little Austin, Texas outfit with a litigation trail behind it by the name of Crossroads Systems.

The publicly traded Texas company accused 3PAR along with six other storage houses of infringing on its router and data storage patents in the Western District of Texas court in Austin Wednesday, according to the Austin Business Journal.

Whether Crossroads wins or not - and it has succeeded in wresting settlements before - it's just jacked up 3PAR's price for either HP or Dell by whatever the legal bills run.

Dell was supposed to decide Wednesday whether it was going to match or better HP's pie-in-the-sky $30-a-share bid for 3PAR last Friday worth $2 billion altogether. The stock market assumed it would in running up 3PAR's stock to 32 bucks a share.

Ironically, Crossroads, which claims to deliver solutions to connect, protect, secure and restore business-critical data based on patented core routing messaging interface (RMI) technology, seems to have gotten a global reseller deal for the healthcare market with Dell Services in mid-August and says on its web site that it's got an OEM partnership with HP as well as EMC and Quantum.

Crossroads Wednesday also posted its third-quarter results showing product revenues of $884,000, down from $941,000 in Q2, and revenue from IP licensing and royalties of $2.3 million, down from $4.1 million sequentially. It lost $1.5 million.

The other companies reportedly sued include American Megatrends, Rorke Data, D-Link Systems, Chelsio Communications, DataCore Software Corporation and iStor Networks.