Global Semiconductor Provider Reduces Costs Through Storage Consolidation Using McDATA Extended SAN Solution

Business Wire, April 11, 2005

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- Global semiconductor provider Agere Systems completed an aggressive cost-containment initiative with a dual fabric extended storage area network (SAN) provided by McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT), a leading provider of data infrastructure solutions. The McDATA Intrepid(R) Directors and Sphereon(TM) Fabric Switches enabled Agere to implement a substantial storage consolidation project while providing the scalability and capacity to support the firm's upgrade of its enterprise-wide Oracle ERP application.

Headquartered in Allentown, Pa., Agere designs, develops, manufactures and sells integrated circuit solutions for high-density storage, multi-service networking, wireless data and PC applications, generating revenue of US $1.91 billion in 2004. The company's chips and software power a broad range of computing and communications applications, from cell phones, PCs, PDAs and hard disk drives, to the world's most sophisticated public and enterprise networks. In addition, the company's custom ASIC division is a leading provider of semiconductors for storage networking applications.

According to Nelson Fernandez, senior manager for Data Center & IT Security at Agere Systems: "The McDATA switches were a core element to the completion of our storage consolidation projects. They have the scalability and reliability our Oracle ERP system requires to sustain round-the-clock access by offices worldwide."

"Our business process reengineering initiative enabled our server and storage consolidation project that significantly lowered the company's monthly IT budget run rate -- and retired greater than 1,400 servers. The McDATA solutions are key components to implementing our SAN storage consolidation, lowering our monthly storage run rate by 83 percent while increasing raw storage use by 67 percent," said Fernandez.

Agere's IT managers utilized the McDATA infrastructure as part of a cost-cutting "Disaster Recovery (DR) for free" program. The solution enabled an extended SAN network capable of backing up data across both the firm's corporate data centers. The cost to implement this architecture was substantially less than dedicated disaster recovery alternatives. In addition, Agere is implementing a mirrored data center business continuance/disaster recovery solution that will take the firm's business continuance capabilities to a higher level.

Uptime is a top concern to an IT department responsible for supporting centralized applications accessed by 40 sites globally around the clock. To meet this need, Agere Systems innovatively split two fabrics across two physical, hot-site data centers a mile apart, linked via fiber to create an extended SAN. They connect two McDATA Intrepid directors at each data center to a McDATA Sphereon fabric switch to front end a StorageTek tape library. Data is synchronously mirrored between the data centers using EMC.

"The two mirrored data centers provided the foundation to meet the containing costs and incorporating disaster recovery capabilities basically for free. Consolidation of resources and inexpensive connectivity is one of the first steps in implementing a Global Enterprise Data Center where the data infrastructure is optimized to provide secure, transparent data access across the enterprise," said Wayne Morris, senior vice president of marketing, McDATA.

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.

Forward-Looking Statements

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