McDATA's Success to Continue as Fibre Channel Switch Market Grows.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 8, 2004

McDATA Fastest Growing Vendor in Fixed Port Switch Revenue; Maintains

Dominance in Director Market

McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT), the expert provider of multi-capable storage networking solutions, today announced positive results from IDC's latest study on the state of the Fibre Channel Switch market, "Worldwide Fibre Channel Switch 2004-2008 Forecast and 2003 Vendor Market Share." Between 2002 and 2003, McDATA's overall FC switch revenue share increased 4.7 percentage points from 29.7 to 34.4 percent, and port shipment share increased from 22.5 to 27.7 percent.

"FC chassis switches accounted for almost all of the revenue growth in the overall FC switch market in 2003," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems research at IDC. "McDATA remains the market leader in this sector, shipping more than 50 percent of chassis switch ports."

The success of McDATA's family of Sphereon(TM) Fabric Switches also contributed to changes in the overall vendor market share distribution. McDATA's revenue share in the FC fixed port market rose from 9.4 to 19.7 percent, port shipment share increased from 8.7 to 16.8 percent. The award-winning Sphereon product-line, with features such as HotCAT(TM) non-disruptive online code activation and McDATA's exclusive, pay-as-you-grow FlexPort technology, is a perfect match for rapidly growing small and medium-sized business customer needs, and enterprise edge deployments.

"Revenue from our Sphereon family of switches increased more than 100 percent from 2002 to 2003, making us the fastest growing vendor in the fixed port switch market. This is a strong endorsement of McDATA's solutions and confirms customers support our platform strategy. Overall, McDATA's solid portfolio of solutions, with features such as SecureConnect(TM) multi-protocol SAN Routing, storage virtualization, distance connectivity over IP, disaster recovery/business continuance capabilities and software with heterogeneous SAN management and security tools, contributed to McDATA's market share growth in 2003, providing a strong base for future growth," said Jeff Vogel, senior vice president of worldwide marketing and solutions, McDATA. "From that base, throughout 2004, McDATA is focusing on strengthening current OEM and partner relationships and on cultivating new opportunities in effort to help businesses meet their data access and management requirements with the most reliable, cost-effective and custom-fitting solutions."

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT) is the expert provider of Multi-Capable Storage Networking Solutions(TM) -- hardware, software and services -- that enable partners and customers around the world to reduce the total cost of storage management today, and be ready to adapt to the real-time information demands of tomorrow. Entrenched in over 8,000 data centers worldwide, McDATA solutions are at the heart of more than 80 percent of Fortune 100 storage network data centers, powering the latest e-business applications, customer databases, financial traffic and other mission-critical data. Customers leverage McDATA's multi-capable solutions to realize immediate cost savings, reduce their investment risk, ensure the continuity of their operations and adapt to changing business requirements.

Forward-Looking Statements 

This press release contains statements about expected future events that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Readers are urged to consider statements that include the terms "believes", "belief", "expects", "plans", "objectives", "estimates", "anticipates", "intends", "targets", or the like to be uncertain and forward-looking. Factors that could cause actual results to differ and vary materially from expectations include, but are not limited to, our ability to ramp SANavigator sales, our relationships with EMC Corporation and IBM and the level of their orders, the impact of the continued general economic slowdown on purchasing decisions by customers and capital spending, our ability to expand sales into higher margin channels through system integrators and distributors, a loss of any of our key customers (or our OEMs' key customers), distributors, resellers or our contract manufacturers, our ability to expand our product offerings and any transition to new products, (such as higher port count and multi-protocol products) integrate recent acquisitions and OEM qualification of such new products which may occur after the general availability dates, possible inventory charges that may occur with any transition to such new products, component quality and availability, the development of the storage area network and switch markets, competition in the storage area network and switch markets, aggressive pricing and product give-aways by competitors, one-time events and other important risk factors disclosed previously and from time to time in our filings at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These cautionary statements by us should not be construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacy of disclosures made by us. We cannot always predict or determine after the fact what factors would cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements or other statements. All cautionary statements should be read as being applicable to all forward-looking statements wherever they appear. We do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.