MoneyGram Powers Mainframe Server Resource Virtualization and Disaster Recovery System with McDATA Directors

Business Wire, Oct 17, 2005

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT), a leading provider of storage networking solutions, today announced that MoneyGram International, Inc. consolidated its storage with the deployment of a SAN based on four McDATA Intrepid 6140 Directors. The SAN supports MoneyGram's requirements around mainframe and open systems server virtualization and has saved the company $400,000 in hardware and network connectivity costs and $120,000 in annual bandwidth fees.

"We looked at other vendors, but McDATA provided the most stable platform for our intermixed environment, which is vital to our IT systems and service level agreements with our customers," said Tom Becchetti, MoneyGram's senior capacity planner. "The McDATA directors support multiple input/output interfaces which allows us to take advantage of the faster and more efficient FICON interface. That reliability and the cost savings made our choice to go with McDATA an easy one."

MoneyGram is a leading global payment services company providing an online platform for financial institutions and retail customers to conduct global money transfers and money orders around the clock. The new, more efficient SAN increased throughput data availability for MoneyGram's Web-based applications, improving customer satisfaction.

The McDATA Intrepid directors enabled the company to consolidate its storage and virtualize mainframe and open systems server resources over a single SAN. Two McDATA Sphereon 4500 Fabric Switches were deployed at a secondary site to manage the flow of information.

"Mainframe and open systems administrators have been virtualizing servers for years, and have been using McDATA solutions to provide the high bandwidth and availability required," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of product management, McDATA. "With McDATA directors at the core of MoneyGram's SAN, the company not only saves a significant amount of money, but can better organize storage resources and prioritize capacity to support customer-facing systems. As a result, information can be accessed more quickly and maintain their service level agreements."

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT) is the leading provider of storage networking solutions, helping customers build, globally connect, optimize and centrally manage data infrastructures across SAN, MAN and WAN environments. With nearly 25 years' experience developing SAN products, services and solutions, McDATA is the trusted partner in the world's largest data centers, connecting more than two-thirds of all networked data.

Forward-Looking Statements

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