McDATA Backbone Director Powers Enterprise SANs for Sun Customers; Sun Microsystems Qualifies McDATA's Intrepid 10000.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA)(Nasdaq:MCDT), a leading provider of storage networking solutions, today announced that Sun Microsystems has qualified and made generally available McDATA's Intrepid 10000 Director (i10K) for both Fibre Channel (FC) and FICON deployments as part of Sun's advanced portfolio of storage networking solutions. The i10K boosts Sun's ability to deliver high-performance, manageable and scalable access to data and resource sharing.

"The McDATA Intrepid 10000 Backbone Director helps our customers simplify their networks, more successfully tackle infrastructure challenges and ensure future compliance and flexibility," said Michael Proffitt, Product Line Director, Networking, Data Management Group, Sun Microsystems. "Consolidating multiple SANs on an i10K may be accomplished with Director FlexPars(TM), which separate the customers' SANs into secure partitions. The i10K will accommodate the merging of the SANs over time as customers move data to implement their ILM strategies."

On top of the cost savings afforded by the Intrepid 10000's robust architecture, the virtual directors (FlexPars) act as separate physical switches, all housed in the same enclosure for rack space economy. The i10K leverages its buffer credit capabilities to drive distances beyond 190KM at 10 Gb/s synchronous speeds over dark fiber, which means that only McDATA's i10K offers the highest level of performance required for enabling business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.

"McDATA is the undisputed enterprise storage networking industry leader with more than 20,000 directors installed, including over 3,500 FICON directors. Our customers and storage partners depend on McDATA products and services," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of product management, McDATA. "Sun, and our other major OEMS, all carry our backbone director, providing customers with a comprehensive and flexible portfolio of storage networking solutions."

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq:MCDTA)(Nasdaq:MCDT) is the leading provider of storage networking solutions, helping customers build, globally connect, optimize and centrally manage data infrastructures across SAN, MAN and WAN environments. With nearly 25 years experience developing SAN products, services and solutions, McDATA is the trusted partner in the world's largest data centers, connecting more than two-thirds of all networked data.

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, McDATA's relationships with EMC, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems and the level of their orders, aggressive price competition by numerous other SAN and IP switch suppliers, OEM qualification of our new products - such as the Intrepid 10000 Director, integration of CNT's sales and marketing functions, manufacturing constraints, constraints in obtaining third party product for resale and other risk factors that are disclosed in McDATA's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These cautionary statements by McDATA should not be construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacy of disclosures made by McDATA. All cautionary statements should be read as being applicable to all forward-looking statements wherever they appear. McDATA does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.