Akara Joins McDATA OpenReady Partners Program; Customers Gain Tested Storage Solution for Extending Business Continuance Applications Across The MAN/WAN

Business Wire, April 23, 2002

Business/Technology Editors

OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 23, 2002

Akara, a leading developer of storage extension solutions for business continuance applications across the MAN/WAN, and McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDT/MCDTA), the worldwide leader in open storage networking solutions, today announced that Akara has joined the McDATA OpenReady Interoperability Partners Program. Akara's OUSP(TM) 2000 product family has been certified for interoperability with McDATA solutions, eliminating much of the challenge Global 2000 IT professionals face in deploying an extended SAN with multiple vendors' products. The two companies participated in extensive testing to ensure a level of interoperability that provides enterprises with a cost-effective, high performance solution for extending their SANs across the WAN for business continuance.

"Our participation in McDATA's OpenReady program means that customers can easily extend their SANs over greater distances while meeting the requirements of their most advanced business continuance applications," said Ed Ogonek, CEO of Akara. "As a result of our commitment to achieve interoperability with leading storage networking solution providers, customers can immediately benefit from solutions that extend applications such as disk-mirroring, tape/disk back-up and server geo-clustering with the highest levels of performance and interoperability."

Akara is the only optical networking company with a singular focus on extending business continuance applications between data centers and across the MAN/WAN. Akara's Optical Utility Services Platform (OUSP) multiplexes data center protocols such as Fibre Channel (FC), FICON, ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) directly into flexible SONET payloads to extend enterprises' business continuance applications over existing SONET/SDH, dark fiber or DWDM networks. The OUSP product family is "enterprise-ready" with OC-3, OC-12 and OC-48 connectivity, enabling the majority of Global 2000 enterprises to easily connect their storage networks to carriers' ubiquitous SONET services for high-performance, cost-effective extended storage networking. Akara's OUSP enables enterprises and carriers to create multiple FC links over a single metro-DWDM wavelength or carrier-leased SONET circuit. The OUSP also enables carriers to deliver differentiated, high ROI services such as FC private lines and GbE private lines by leveraging their existing network assets for the enterprise.

"We are pleased to have Akara join McDATA's OpenReady Interoperability program," said Peter Dougherty, vice president of business development and strategic alliances. "When key players such as Akara participate, enterprises with critical business continuance requirements gain access to best-of-breed technologies with the assurance of interoperability. The result of our collaboration is scalable, reliable SAN extension solutions with the low cost of ownership needed to make them accessible to the majority of Global 2000 enterprises."

About Akara

Akara Corporation develops data center multiplexing equipment that delivers industry-leading network solutions for MAN/WAN connectivity focusing on business continuance applications through enterprise private network builds and carrier/service provider special network builds. The Akara OUSP(TM) product family is composed of a configurable, customer premise platform and a feature-rich services and network management system. Akara's OUSP significantly reduces operational and capital expenses by leveraging the existing SONET/SDH, dark fiber or DWDM infrastructures, and guarantees the performance of data center protocols such as Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet for distance-extended, business continuance storage applications. Akara has offices in Ottawa, Ontario and Waltham, Massachusetts. www.akara.com.