McDATA Surpasses 20,000 Director Milestone; Customers Worldwide Endorse Continuing Industry Leadership

Dallas, Texas-based ACS/AMS, a leading business process andinformation technology outsource solutions provider, has been usingMcDATA products since 2000. The original startup company, E-online,purchased some of the first McDATA directors to establish theirbusiness infrastructure. A few years and many McDATA products laterthey were acquired by ACS, and are now one of the largest applicationservice providers in the world.

"The natural progression of our growth as a company has beenmirrored by McDATA's technological progression to providing largerbuilding blocks to implement the large scale SANs that we need. Westarted with one McDATA ED-5000 and are now at 3000 ports and growing.Plans for our new data center are based on McDATA's Intrepid 10000Directors," said Bill Augustadt, CTO for ACS/AMS. "While we looked atthe competition, we ultimately decided to standardize ourinfrastructure on McDATA because of its product's capabilities, itsprofessional services organization and overall company direction."

Getronics PinkRoccade, the largest information and communicationtechnology solutions company in The Netherlands, recently purchasedtwo Intrepid 10000's, four Eclipse 2640 SAN Routers and 12 Sphereon4500 Fabric Switches through value-added reseller Estorage.

"The experience in the past and the capability to build amulti-vendor Storage Area Network (SAN) in The Netherlands are themain reasons why we continue to build the SAN infrastructure withMcDATA equipment," said Frans Bank, Senior ICT Consultant withGetronics PinkRoccade.

The Agricultural Bank of China, one of China's main financialinstitutions, recently purchased several Intrepid 10000 Directors toserve as the high performance backbone at the core of theinstitution's data center.

"The Agricultural Bank of China began deploying McDATA solutionsin 2002, and we recently purchased an additional four units of theIntrepid 10K backbone director for the Bank's core systems in ourShanghai data center," said Mr. Guya Cao, IT director, AgriculturalBank of China. "The high availability, stability and reliability ofMcDATA's director class SAN switches helps to ensure that our systemsoperate securely and with minimum downtime. That's why we chose McDATAagain when we needed to expand our mission-critical business systems."

McDATA's Intrepid directors are built on more than 23 years ofstorage networking experience and are the Gold standard for storagenetworking director-class products. In addition to being the first tooffer a fibre channel director, McDATA was the first to offer a FICONdirector and, more recently, the first to have directors that supportN_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) applications. McDATA was also thefirst to support hot code load activation with its innovativeHotCAT(TM) technology and hot component swap on fibre channeldirectors; the first to market with a 256 port director; the first outwith a 10Gb/s director and the first with hard partitioning(FlexPars).

"McDATA's unmatched storage networking experience, combined withour commitments to product excellence and customer satisfaction hasmade the Intrepid brand the most trusted director name and allowed usto outsell our closest competitor by four to one," said John Kelley,president, chairman and CEO, McDATA. "We are constantly at work toensure that customers such as ACS/AMS, Getronics PinkRoccade and theAgricultural Bank of China -- and all of our customers worldwide --benefit from McDATA's innovative approach and commitment to excellencein storage area networking."

(a) Market share calculations are based on McDATA's fiscal Q205actual reported results, adjusted for a calendar quarter.

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT) is the leading provider ofstorage networking solutions, helping customers build, globallyconnect, optimize and centrally manage data infrastructures acrossSAN, MAN and WAN environments. With nearly 25 years experiencedeveloping SAN products, services and solutions, McDATA is the trustedpartner in the world's largest data centers, connecting more thantwo-thirds of all networked data.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains statements about expected futureevents that are forward-looking and subject to risks anduncertainties. Readers are urged to consider statements that includethe terms "believes," "belief," "expects," "plans," "objectives,""estimates," "anticipates," "intends," "targets," or the like to beuncertain and forward-looking. Factors that could cause actual resultsto differ and vary materially from expectations include, but are notlimited to, McDATA's relationships with EMC, IBM and Hitachi DataSystems and the level of their orders, aggressive price competition bynumerous other SAN and IP switch suppliers, OEM qualification of ournew products -- such as the Intrepid 10000 Director, integration ofCNT's sales and marketing functions, manufacturing constraints,constraints in obtaining third party product for resale and other riskfactors that are disclosed in McDATA's filings with the Securities andExchange Commission. These cautionary statements by McDATA should notbe construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacyof disclosures made by McDATA. All cautionary statements should beread as being applicable to all forward-looking statements whereverthey appear. McDATA does not undertake any obligation to publiclyupdate or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a resultof new information, future events or otherwise.