McDATA Appoints Country Sales Manager of Italy; McDATA EMEA Continues to Extend Reach, New Leadership to Lead the Charge.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

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

McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT), the expert provider of multi-capable storage networking solutions, today announced the appointment of Gianni Altamura as country sales manager of Italy. The appointment reinforces McDATA's commitment to continue building a European-based organization that locally supports partners and customers with McDATA's complete line of storage networking solutions and services. Altamura assumed his new position June 1, replacing Andy Reid, who will take over McDATA's business in the Middle East.

"I look forward to helping solve the most important problems that our customers in Italy face every day, such as data consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and availability, to name a few," said Altamura. "Our mission for the Italian market is to offer the best solutions, support and skills in order to provide our customers with individual strategies to meet their storage requirements."

Before joining McDATA, Altamura gained experience in the storage industry working for five years as the Italian country manager for Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC). Prior to ADIC, he worked for five years as a branch sales manager for MTI, a storage company.

"Since McDATA established its office in Italy in 2002, we've been listening closely to what our OEMs', channel partners' and customers' requirements are regarding their storage infrastructure," said Georg Bartz, vice president EMEA sales and services for McDATA. "With Gianni's leadership, we will continue to provide our partners and customers with the world's best storage networking solutions to help them protect their data, save money and meet any SAN objectives."

Currently, McDATA's switch and software OEM's and channel partners in Italy include EMC, IBM, HPQ, Hitachi Data Systems, Sun, STK, and Dell, including Terasystem, Algol, Magirus, Computer Gross and Avnet as reseller partners.

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: 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.