McDATA to Demonstrate Affordable Disaster Recovery With IP SANs; Expert Participation in Panels at Storage World Conference

Business Wire, June 28, 2004

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- Working with Leading Virtualization Vendor, McDATA's Eclipse Multi-Protocol SAN Router Brings Intelligence into the Fabric

McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT), the expert provider of multi-capable storage networking solutions, will demonstrate secure, multi-protocol SAN Routing, enabled with virtualization and mirroring capabilities from partners Aarohi Communications and StoreAge Networking Technologies, at Storage World Conference in Long Beach, California, June 29-July 1. Demonstrations will take place at in Booth #430, and in the Storage Clinic, tables D4 and D5.

The demonstration will use McDATA's Sphereon(TM) Fabric Switches and Eclipse(TM) Multi-Protocol SAN Routers to show data movement among multiple fabrics in addition to showing how tiered network routing facilitates higher performance and greater data protection -- capabilities that answer needs such as disaster recovery, campus storage connectivity, consolidation of remote tape backup or content sharing over regional distances.

McDATA Vice President of Switch Platforms, Peter Dougherty, will provide the keynote address to start off the sessions on July 1. Additionally, Dougherty and fellow McDATA executives will participate in a variety of roundtables and panels including:

--Tom Clark -- IP SANs Tutorial (June 29)

--Peter Dougherty -- Fabric-based Intelligence Roundtable (June 30)

--Prasad Pammidimukkala -- Connectivity Roundtable (June 30)

--Brandon Hoff -- Security Panel (June 30)

--Peter Dougherty -- Keynote address (July 1)

In the Storage World Conference Clinic demonstration, McDATA will show IP as a transport for storage data and a few of the benefits it provides, such as MAN/WAN connectivity options and easy, affordable long distance data transfer. The demo includes two geographically separate fibre channel storage area networks, one in McDATA's booth (#430) and the other in the Clinic. StoreAge's Storage Virtualization Management appliance will create snapshots of the data, which can be mirrored to remote sites for backup and disaster recovery over IP.

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.