McDATA Announces the Industry's First Backbone Director -- The Intrep

McDATA Announces the Industry's First Backbone Director -- The Intrepid i10K

    Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

    BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 18, 2005--

As a New Category of Director, the Intrepid i10K Delivers 10Gbit/s and Dynamic Network Provisioning Required for a Global Enterprise Data Center
    McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT), the leading provider of storage networking solutions, today announced its Intrepid(R) i10K, the industry's first Backbone Director designed for the heart of the Global Enterprise Data Center. The Intrepid i10K Backbone Director supports dynamic network partitioning and offers customers an end-to-end partitioning solution from application to array, allowing data to be independently managed, controlled, protected and moved to meet application demands. In addition, the Intrepid i10K Backbone Director enables secure SAN island and large fabric consolidation, significantly lowering the total cost of ownership and offering customers secure, carrier class availability for the backbone of the enterprise.
    McDATA's Intrepid i10K Backbone Director is key to enabling a tiered storage networking strategy, where a customer's infrastructure is matched with their tiered storage environment allowing for cost effective deployment of information lifecycle management strategies. A scalable environment, achieved through the Intrepid i10K Backbone Director, accommodates future technologies, such as virtualization, and maintains simplicity of design, keeping storage networking costs low and ultimately providing an entire organization access to information anytime from any location in the world.
    "EMC will offer this new technology from McDATA as the EMC Connectrix ED-10000M backbone director. When deployed at the core of the network and in conjunction with EMC networked storage systems, it will further our efforts to provide customers with an infrastructure that enables information lifecycle management while helping them achieve significant cost-savings, improved service levels and the highest levels of automation," said Chuck Hollis, vice president of platforms marketing, EMC.
    As a Backbone Director, the Intrepid i10K reduces capital costs and simplifies management by consolidating the network footprint with 256 non-blocking ports, native 10Gbit/s ISLs and patent pending director FlexPar(TM) technology. Each director FlexPar delivers hard network partitioning, ensuring complete fire-walled separation of all traffic. Together, the new technologies in the Intrepid i10K Backbone Director enable customers to securely consolidate the infrastructure enterprise-wide while maintaining the security and control of independent SAN islands.
    "We were especially interested in the Intrepid i10K's Director FlexPars, which provide secure partitioning from the server to the array as the technology dynamically moves resources by application based on demand. I haven't seen anything else on the market with all of the features, capabilities, protection and return on investment that the McDATA Intrepid i10K Director has. The technology has integrated effectively into our existing infrastructure," said Jason McKnespiey of B&Q plc, the United Kingdom's leading and international "home improvement" retail company and early ship Intrepid i10k Backbone Director customer. "We successfully completed testing with the Intrepid i10K, and found the large cache of configurable buffer-to-buffer credits enables us to potentially extend our SAN far beyond the distance limits other switch vendors are currently offering."
    The Intrepid i10K Backbone Director provides secure, dynamic partitioning from application to the array via director FlexPar technology. Only McDATA director FlexPars deliver the capability to dynamically move resources according to service level agreements (SLAs) by application, department or company to meet the growing "on demand" requirements in many organizations.
    "The Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, the Thunder 9500 V Series storage systems, and the Lightning 9900 V Series enterprise storage systems, offer the industry's leading tiered storage infrastructure," said Scott Genereux, senior vice president, global marketing and global channels, Hitachi Data Systems. "The features and functionalities of the i10K, such as Director FlexPars -- which dynamically and independently separate, control and manage resources for improved asset utilization -- provide tiered storage networking that will allow customers to further align storage environments with business critical applications."
    The Intrepid i10K Backbone Director drives 10Gbit/s per second over dark fibre and up to 190 kilometers in distance, enabling five-nines application availability across the enterprise. The Intrepid i10K Backbone Director is also able to deliver value-added routing and storage virtualization services with its upcoming Director Service Modules. Importantly, McDATA's Intrepid i10K Backbone Director builds on McDATA's availability heritage by delivering new software isolation and data integrity enhancements.
    McDATA's Intrepid i10K is the backbone of a tiered network for a Global Enterprise Data Center (GEDC). Based on a vision of global consolidation and connection of enterprise resources, the GEDC delivers customers with automated access to information at any hour of the day from any location on the globe.
    Only a tiered storage network from McDATA can deliver the architecture necessary to meet the requirements for a Global Enterprise Data Center, based on flexibility, interoperability, security, performance, management and cost. The Intrepid i10K Backbone Director compliments McDATA's Intrepid 6140 director, which will continue to provide cost-effective connectivity to the tiered network. Only McDATA has the proven capability to deliver data center quality fibre channel directors, quality edge and interconnect devices and comprehensive management solutions.
    "There are four key areas which define a backbone director: network consolidation, dynamic network partitioning, 10Gbit/s intelligent network services and carrier-class availability for the enterprise. Only McDATA's Intrepid i10K Backbone Director delivers the complete backbone functionality required by Global 500 customers," said Patrick Harr, vice president of director platforms, McDATA. "With the i10K, customers can now cost-effectively implement a tiered, Global Enterprise Data Center network -- a network which provides real-time information access to information anytime, anywhere."
    The Intrepid i10K Backbone Director is expected to be generally available for purchase worldwide in McDATA's fiscal first quarter, February-April 2005.
    For more information on tiered storage networking, visit http://www.mcdata.com/downloads/mkt/wpaper/esg_tiered_san_arch.pdf.

    About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

    McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT) is the only vendor today uniquely positioned to deliver a unified information infrastructure -- key to enabling a world where digital data is instantly transformed into useful information, accessed -- anytime, anywhere. With more than 20 years of storage networking experience, McDATA's comprehensive product portfolio enables 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. Trusted in the world's largest data centers, McDATA connects more than two-thirds of all the world's networked data, powering the latest e-business applications, customer databases, financial traffic and other mission-critical data.

    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 relationships with EMC, IBM and HDS and the level of their orders, aggressive price competition by numerous other SAN and IP switch suppliers, OEM qualification of our new products, manufacturing constraints and other risk factors that are disclosed in our filings with the 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. 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.

    Appendix: Intrepid i10K Backbone Director
    Analyst Quotes

    "The Intrepid i10K Director's FlexPars and Zone FlexPars features allow partitioning to create dynamic resource provisioning for application specific control. This will enable the security and fault isolation needed for data protection in enterprise environments," said Randy Kerns, senior partner at the Evaluator Group. "Combined with 10Gbit/s fabric connection, the Intrepid i10K extends the capabilities for data replication and connectivity beyond what has been available previously. The implementation of the i10K goes beyond a software layer for isolation of SANs and RSCNs to provide a truly available, flexible solution for enterprise fabrics."
    "This is an important announcement not only for McDATA but for the storage networking industry as a whole," said Nancy Hurley, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The launch of the Intrepid i10K Backbone Director represents much more than the availability of a newer, bigger director product. When McDATA acquired the foundational technology for the i10K in 2003, it purchased technology that would be the basis of next generation SANs. McDATA had the foresight to see the storage market following an evolutionary pattern similar to the networking/telecom industry -- moving toward the need to create tiered storage networks -- and the need for a new class of director -- a Backbone Director -- capable of supporting these tiered networks."
    "Secure SAN islands have become the standard because it minimizes the impact and number of application disruptions," said Marc Staimer, Dragonslayer Consulting. "Only McDATA's i10K FlexPars provides that same level of disruption reduction within a Director's infrastructure. This gives SAN administrators the flexibility of moving resources between partitions on that director without reconfiguring the entire director. Other Director partitioning technologies, such as VSANs, utilize a single running instance of the Fibre Channel services and will propagate versus isolate SAN disruptions between SAN partitions."
    "SAN islands were the logical choice when administrators first started to feel the effects of managing extensive amounts of data. However, as data quantities have continued to grow, so have the number of SAN islands necessary to manage them -- causing a new set of problems around controlling costs, maintaining security and management on all levels. A tiered storage strategy, based on a SAN infrastructure that can provide secure separation by application, department or company, deployed with McDATA's i10K as the core backbone, enables companies to do more with less, simplify and downsize their fabric, meet compliance requirements and still cut costs," said Mike Karp, senior storage analyst, Enterprise Management Associates.
    "McDATA is first to introduce 10Gbit/s speed and its benefits, such as intelligent disaster recovery, and dynamic network provisioning of resources with embedded software for fault isolation, advanced diagnostics and heterogeneous performance monitoring from the application to the array. The wide range of features and functionality as well as support for a full portfolio of end-to-end solutions should prove attractive to enterprises," said David Hill, Mesabi Group.
    "McDATA's Intrepid i10K backbone director is amongst the best offerings in the industry to reduce overall management and administration costs by providing a single management interface for the entire tiered architecture," said Stephanie Balaouras, The Yankee Group. "McDATA's broad and flexible portfolio enables organizations to implement a solution that best fits their storage networking needs while assuring the network will be able to scale in any direction required by business demands," said Balaouras.
    "Deploying truly scalable and manageable tiered storage solutions is a critical challenge for enterprises as they work to more effectively manage information and get greater value from existing IT assets. A key to making tiered storage a reality is the development of SAN switch solutions that can adapt to changing technology and performance requirements, said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC. "Solutions like McDATA's new i10K that boost overall reliability while enabling companies to tune growing SAN environments and extend SAN functions across greater distances will play a pivotal role in the next wave of storage networks."
    "The concept of secure dynamic resource movement and partitioning from the HBA thorough the array is unique to Intrepid i10K and I think the customers that are consolidating their SANs would find this functionality very useful, especially since it allows restarting individual partitions, while the other partitions continue to operate undisturbed", said Arun Taneja, founder, Taneja Group.

    Gartner's view on the industry:

    "The ability to grow capacity by integrating new products while maintaining manageability of the expanded infrastructure is the essence of investment protection. Products that can seamlessly integrate, consolidate and manage fabrics with products from multiple vendors supporting multiple speeds and protocols will soon become standard," said James Opfer, Gartner.

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CONTACT: McDATA Corporation Media: Kathleen Sullivan, 720-558-4435 Cell: 720-480-5501 press.release@mcdata.com or Investors: Renee Lyall, 720-558-4629 renee.lyall@mcdata.com

KEYWORD: COLORADO GERMANY INTERNATIONAL EUROPE INDUSTRY KEYWORD: HARDWARE SOFTWARE NETWORKING PRODUCT Technology_IT SOURCE: McDATA Corporation

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