McDATA-authored Standard for Virtual Fabrics Gets Industry Nod; New Standard Improves Storage Management, Utilization and Scalability.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT) today announced that the Internet Engineering Task Force has approved an industry standard management information base (MIB) for Virtual Fabrics authored by McDATA engineers and other industry peers. McDATA has been an early leader supporting virtual fabrics with the introduction of the Intrepid 10000 and will be delivering major enhancements to this technology later this year. The IETF standard MIB for Virtual Fabrics permits physical resources within compliant cross-vendor directors to be managed at a finer level to better consolidate resources for more efficient utilization.

Virtual Fabrics allow a large director to be separated and managed as multiple virtual switches for isolation and resource sharing. One director chassis may support multiple Virtual Fabrics and Virtual Switches that may be administered by different people and assigned to different departments and functionality. Since this allows fabrics to be smaller, they are easier to operate and manage.

"McDATA continues to advance innovation in the industry by leading standardization efforts. The open standard for Virtual Fabrics is another important progression in McDATA's 24-year commitment to interoperability," said Michael Frendo, senior vice president of engineering, McDATA. "McDATA has been a major contributor to more than 20 industry standards in use today and will continue to lead the industry toward even greater interoperability."

McDATA has chaired the Fibre Channel Generic Services Project for more than six years and currently holds officer positions in more than 15 committees in T10, T11 and IETF.

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT) is the only data infrastructure solutions provider that can deliver a Global Enterprise Data Center -- a globally connected, centrally managed and highly optimized data network. With more than 20 years of storage networking experience, McDATA is trusted in the world's largest data centers, connecting more than two-thirds of all networked data and enabling information access anytime, anywhere.

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