McDATA and GiantLoop Network Team to Bring SANs to Metropolitan Area Networks

Business Wire, August 21, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

BROOMFIELD, Colo. & WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 21, 2001

Partnership Provides End-To-End Optical Storage Networking

Solutions To Enterprise Customers

McDATA(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT), a global leader in open storage networking solutions, and GiantLoop Network, Inc., the leading provider of Enterprise Optical Networking services, today announced a groundbreaking alliance to extend the scalability and performance benefits of storage area networks (SANs) over all-optical metropolitan area networks (MANs). The two companies will cooperate on sales, marketing, and system integration and interoperability to deliver these innovative solutions to enterprise customers.

According to Peripheral Concepts, the SAN market will jump from $4 billion in 2000 to over $14.5 billion in 2003. This growth will boost penetration of facilities-based SANs and also increase demand for enterprise and metropolitan-area SANs to improve operational efficiencies, increase data protection, and extend management domains. Metropolitan area SAN connectivity solutions are available today, but no equipment vendor or service provider specializes in building and managing enterprise SANs that extend across the metro area network - until now.

"McDATA is committed to meeting our customers' needs, and our customers are increasingly asking for solutions that extend their storage area networks over distance," said Mike Gustafson, McDATA vice president of worldwide sales. "Partnering with GiantLoop, the leading provider of Enterprise Optical Networking services, allows McDATA to offer customers the benefits of inter-connected, metro SANs, with increased data availability, business continuity protection, and simplified management."

The partnership brings immediate benefits to enterprise customers as the two companies combine GiantLoop's managed network and professional services with McDATA's 6000 Series Director - the SAN industry's only single stage 64-port director and its solution initiatives. The companies will collaborate on the sales, marketing, integration, and deployment of enterprise-class SANs, and the connectivity between those SANs over private, high-performance, enterprise optical networks.

"The next logical phase in the storage evolution is to extend storage networks beyond the boundaries of physical facilities," said Farid Neema, president of Peripheral Concepts. "This partnership delivers on this phase and establishes a roadmap to make metropolitan SANs easier to deploy and manage."

Enterprise companies can also utilize this protocol-independent optical infrastructure to aggregate other storage, data, voice, and multimedia traffic onto one centrally managed, metropolitan network and leverage these infrastructure solutions protocols as they become available.

"Before this partnership existed, there really were no true optical storage networking solutions available to the enterprise," said Joe Gately, GiantLoop Network senior vice president of marketing and alliances. "Fibre Channel switches were delivered by server or storage subsystem vendors and viewed as a device extension. The GiantLoop/McDATA partnership means that enterprise customers can work with true networking experts to build enterprise-class SANs that extend across metropolitan areas. Together, GiantLoop and McDATA offer a unique set of products and services that offer immediate improvements in operations, management, and utilization, provide headroom for future storage and bandwidth growth, and marry storage and data networking."

In addition to the market strategy, GiantLoop and McDATA will collaborate on strategic planning, research, and development to support GiantLoop's Enterprise Content Networking initiative that addresses today's data movement requirements like remote mirroring, backup, and data replication with future content delivery needs for eLearning, collaboration, and customer support. "Both data movement and content delivery require an infrastructure that can deliver high-bandwidth and low-latency," said Gately. "The GiantLoop/McDATA alliance delivers immediate IT efficiencies and provides the foundation for these future business driving applications."

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT) is a global leader in open storage networking solutions. Recognized for its highly available, scalable and centrally managed SANs, McDATA's family of solutions represent the backbone of the SAN industry and address enterprise-storage problems. The company's core-to-edge enterprise storage solutions improve the reliability and availability of data to simplify SAN management and reduce the total cost of ownership. Committed to the highest level of service in the industry, McDATA extensively pre-tests SAN solutions to provide IT organizations with the comprehensive tools, methodologies and support essential to robust and timely SAN implementations. McDATA distributes its products through its OEMs, network of resellers and Elite Solution Partners. McDATA is a registered trademark. The McDATA logo and McDATA tagline are trademarks of McDATA Corporation.