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McDATA's Next-Generation,
140-Port Ultra High-Availability Director With
Industry-Leading Port Density Available Today
To Customers Worldwide
BROOMFIELD, Colo. - Oct. 1, 2002 - McDATA® Corporation
(Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT), the worldwide leader in open, ultra high-availability
storage networking solutions, today announced the worldwide availability
of its Intrepid™ 6000 Series 140-port Director, the industry
standard for building the world's largest, most scalable and reliable
enterprise storage networks. The Intrepid 6140 extends McDATA's
leadership in providing customers with the industry's finest large-enterprise
storage networking solutions.
The Intrepid 6140 is complementary to McDATA's widely deployed
64-port Intrepid 6064, providing Director-class connectivity attributes
to larger SANs and mainframe FICON deployments requiring hundreds
or even thousands of ports. The customer-driven, common architecture
of the Intrepid 6140 is completely backwards compatible with McDATA's
entire core-to-edge SAN product family.
"Our storage needs are constantly changing, both in terms
of size and technical requirements. That's why it's absolutely critical
that our storage network is scalable, flexible and highly reliable.
McDATA, with its Intrepid 6140, is the only vendor today that can
meet and exceed those needs," said Bob Anderson, technology
center manager at Pioneer Hi-Bred International. "With its
scalability and flexibility, the Intrepid 6140 allows us to maximize
our IT resources, and we can rest assured that our McDATA storage
network supports the highest level of business continuance."
The Intrepid 6140 provides anywhere from 64 to 140 ports in four-port
increments, in a compact, 12U (21 inch) package, enabling up to
420 ports in a single McDATA FC-512 or any other industry standard
19-inch rack. The Intrepid 6064 will continue to cost effectively
meet the needs of any enterprise that requires Director connectivity
in smaller SAN fabrics, whereas the 6140 will be utilized in the
fast-growing large SAN and FICON segments. The Intrepid 6140 delivers
industry-leading port density, ultra high availability and protocol
independent design.
"Companies continue to look towards storage consolidation
as a way to reduce infrastructure complexity. In order to support
continued storage growth, however, these companies require solutions
that offer greater scalability and availability," said John
McArthur, group vice president for storage research at IDC. "McDATA
remains the market share leader in director-class switches. The
Intrepid 6140 extends McDATA's capabilities by allowing even greater
levels of scalability and availability."
The Intrepid 6140 extends McDATA's leadership in the high-end Director
storage networking market - where it holds a 91 percent market share
- by offering several industry exclusives and delivering a wide
range of customer benefits. No other Director or core switch product
on the market can rival the McDATA Intrepid 6140's ability to meet
growing storage demands, ensure business continuance, increase return
on investment (ROI) and resource utilization, exceed service level
agreements and quickly adapt to changing business needs with simple,
fast deployments.
"McDATA has once again raised the bar in terms of performance,
flexibility and scalability for Director-class, core SAN products.
McDATA, with the Intrepid 6140, allows customers to deploy next-generation
technology today," said John Kelley, chief executive officer
and president of McDATA. "No other SAN product on the market
today can rival the Intrepid 6140's ability to support multiple
protocols, exceed service level agreements and serve as a flexible
platform for future growth and emerging technologies."
Downtime can cost companies millions of dollars per hour, and compromise
future business opportunities. McDATA's Intrepid 6140 and 6064 Directors
ensure the highest levels of availability on the market, exceeding
99.999 percent uptime or less than 5 minutes of downtime per year.
The Intrepid Directors provide bulletproof access to mission-critical
data and offer McDATA's exclusive hot code load and activation (HotCAT™),
allowing new firmware, software, features or functionality to be
deployed without network disruption.
IT staffs are faced with managing constantly growing storage networks
without adding resources. McDATA's Intrepid Directors, coupled with
the award-winning SANavigator™ multi-vendor SAN management
software, keep enterprise SANs performing optimally, by maximizing
both technology and administrative resources. Additionally, storage
networks built on McDATA's high port count, ultra high-availability
Intrepid Directors are inherently easier to manage because they
consist of far fewer elements.
The Intrepid 6140's single-stage crossbar architecture gives IT
administrators the flexibility to configure the McDATA Director
in any way, without worrying about degradation of performance. It
allows customers to purchase only what they need - from 64 to 140
ports in the industry's best granularity - four port increments.
The McDATA Intrepid 6140's completely non-blocking, serial crossbar
architecture provides the industry's optimal building block for
large storage networks and FICON deployments. McDATA supports the
industry's largest SAN fabrics, more than twice the size of its
nearest competitor's largest supported meshed solutions.
McDATA's Intrepid Directors provide exceptional investment protection
with their protocol independent design. The Intrepid Director supports
FICON and Fibre Channel traffic simultaneously today, with a capability
called Intermix, and has an architecture that can support emerging
technologies such as 10Gb/s, iSCSI, FCIP and InfiniBand. McDATA
Directors are deployed in the largest data centers throughout the
world, and are the predominant enterprise-class Director of choice
for the Global 2000. To date, McDATA Fibre Channel and FICON Directors,
now in their sixth generation, have clocked more than 100 million
production hours safeguarding customers' most critical information.
Intrepid Directors also improve the performance and reliability
of critical applications such as Oracle, Seibel, SAP and others
by ensuring constant availability and greater accessibility for
those applications. McDATA Directors provide unwavering performance
and protect against costly disruptions with their low latency and
non-blocking Extendable Open Network (EON™) Architecture. And,
unlike other offerings built with clusters of fabric switches (forcing
data through performance-draining Inter-Switch Links), Intrepid
Directors ensure data is unimpeded on its journey through the network.
The McDATA Intrepid 6140 is available today through Hitachi Data
Systems, IBM and all of McDATA's distributors, resellers and systems
integrators. McDATA's other OEMs, EMC, HP, will make the Intrepid
6140 available upon completion of their individual qualification
testing.
What the industry is saying about the McDATA Intrepid 6140:
"Today, it's unusual to find a server that isn't networked.
In a few years, it will be just as unusual to find storage that
isn't networked," said Paul Ross, EMC's Director of Networked
Storage Marketing. "McDATA's Intrepid 6140 Director will help
accelerate this trend and deliver an essential building block for
deploying reliable and scalable storage networks."
"By offering McDATA's Intrepid 6140 Director, Hitachi Data
Systems is able to deliver to its customers an ideal building block
for deploying highly available enterprise storage networks,"
said Philip Townsend, senior director, worldwide product marketing,
Hitachi Data Systems. "The Intrepid 6140 extends McDATA's leadership
in the high-end, high availability core SAN product space and when
combined with Hitachi Freedom Storage™ Lightning 9900 V series
systems, customers can maximize ROI, extend service level agreements
and improve resource utilization."
"McDATA is the best choice when a customer requires ultra high
availability in an easy-to-deploy and manage enterprise SAN,"
said Karl-Heinz Knapp, general manager product marketing and business
development Comparex. "With its ability to handle FICON and
Fibre Channel traffic at the same time, the Intrepid 6140 is the
most flexible and cost effective core SAN product in the market
today."
"Enterprises increasingly rely on the integrity of FC SANs
and FICON environments that are characterized by increasing size
and complexity. It is now common to deploy one or more director-class
switching products with an aggregation of hundreds of ports at the
core." said Gartner analyst James Opfer. "Directors with
ever greater port counts greatly simplify the cabling of large SANs
by dramatically reducing interswitch connections."
"With its new Intrepid Director, McDATA meets today's requirements
of performance and scalability," says Rainer Staehle, country
manager, Central Region at ACAL FCS. "McDATA shows its technological
competence in the Director segment with 140 ports and 2Gb/s technology
in a single Director. The multi-protocol support of the Intrepid
6140 offers an investment protection today for future technologies."
"MSI believes that storage area networks are a very important
part of building a robust storage infrastructure," said Phil
Sauvageau, executive vice president of products and services for
MSI Systems Integrators based in Omaha, Neb. "While McDATA
has always been a leader with their Director-class Fibre Channel
fabrics, there is clearly a need for higher port densities along
with extremely high reliability, and the Intrepid 6140 Director
delivers both. We believe it will be the product of choice for building
the core of any enterprise SAN."
"Storage needs are growing at alarming rates along with the
requirement to meet business continuance goals, match service level
agreements and adapt to changing business needs," said Jamie
Gruener, senior analyst at Yankee Group. "McDATA is the clear
leader in meeting the storage networking needs of the large enterprise,
and the Intrepid 6140 extends that leadership by allowing companies
to harness their data growth with the highest availability, most
scalable and reliable SAN product on the market today."
"Businesses today must be responsive to the demands of its
customers. In order to enable organizations to meet these challenges
successfully, IT staffs need to manage an ever growing storage infrastructure
and ensure that storage services meet exacting service level requirements,"
said Tony Lock, senior analyst at Bloor Research. "McDATA is
the clear leader in meeting the storage networking needs of the
large enterprise and the Intrepid 6140 enhances that leadership."
"The continued growth of storage increases the pressure upon
large enterprises to keep up with requirements for meeting business
continuance goals, matching service level agreements, and adopting
to changing business needs," said David Hill, vice president
of storage research, Aberdeen Group. "With the introduction
of the Intrepid 6140, McDATA continues to demonstrate leadership
in the high end director market that will facilitate enterprises
in reaching those objectives with their large SANs."
"Storage needs are growing at alarming rates along with the
requirement to meet business continuance goals, match service level
agreements and adapt to changing business needs," said Josh
Krischer, analyst at Gartner Inc., Germany. "The Intrepid 6140
from McDATA extends the scalability to 140 ports, which means less
complicated connectivity for large SANs."
"While companies' storage needs are growing at explosive rates,
their resources to manage that growth mostly are remaining flat,
so a flexible, scalable, highly-available, and easily-manageable
storage network solution is essential," said Mike Kahn, chairman
of The Clipper Group, Inc., technology acquisition consultants based
in Wellesley, MA. "McDATA's Intrepid 6140 extends McDATA's
leadership in large, multi-environment data centers by satisfying
these requirements on the largest scale."
"McDATA's Intrepid 6140 extends their ability to meet the storage
networking needs of large enterprises based on these customers'
top requirements - high availability, scalability and reliability,"
said Neil Osipuk, directing analyst at Infonetics Research.
"Our storage needs are constantly changing, both in terms of
size and technical requirements. That's why it's absolutely critical
that our storage network is scalable, flexible and highly reliable.
McDATA, with its Intrepid 6140, is the only vendor today that can
meet and exceed those needs," said Bob Anderson, technology
center manager at Pioneer Hi-Bred International. "With its
scalability and flexibility, the Intrepid 6140 allows us to maximize
our IT resources, and we can rest assured that our McDATA storage
network supports the highest level of business continuance."
"As a McDATA OPENready partner, BMC works closely with McDATA
to bring scalable, highly-available solutions to market that are
interoperable with BMC's PATROL Storage Management products,"
said Helmuth Klemm, vice president and general manager, enterprise
storage management., BMC Software. "McDATA's innovation and
attention to customer needs in the high-end, enterprise storage
networking industry continues with the introduction of the Intrepid
6140 Director. We look forward to continuing our interoperability
partnership with McDATA as they introduce this next-generation director."
"VERITAS Software and McDATA work together to bring customers
a highly interoperable and manageable networked storage environment,"
said Brenda Zawatski, vice president of product and solutions marketing,
VERITAS Software. "The introduction of the Intrepid 6140 reflects
McDATA's ability to innovate and commitment to leadership in the
enterprise storage networking market."
"As a McDATA OPENready partner, Emulex works closely with McDATA
to ensure broad interoperability between Emulex Fibre Channel host
bus adapters and the Intrepid family of Directors," said Mike
Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex.
"Emulex is confident that the introduction of next generation
enterprise solutions that provide increased scalability, flexibility
and performance, like McDATA's Intrepid 6140 Director, will benefit
customers and broaden the deployment of industry-leading storage
networking solutions."
"Companies continue to look towards storage consolidation as
a way to reduce infrastructure complexity. In order to support continued
storage growth, however, these companies require solutions that
offer greater scalability and availability," said John McArthur,
group vice president for storage research at IDC. "McDATA remains
the marketshare leader in director-class switches. The Intrepid
6140 extends McDATA's capabilities by allowing even greater levels
of scalability and availability."
"McDATA has dominated at the high-end of the fibre channel
market, and clearly aims to keep it that way. The 140 port box comes
along at just the right time as early SAN adopters are starting
to build much bigger installations," said Steve Duplessie,
analyst for the Enterprise Storage Group Inc.
McDATA (NASDAQ: MCDTA/MCDT) is the worldwide leader in open, ultra
high-availability storage networking solutions and provides highly
available, scalable and centrally managed storage area networks
(SANs) that address enterprise-wide storage problems. McDATA's core-to-edge
enterprise SAN solutions improve the reliability and availability
of data to simplify SAN management and reduce the total cost of
ownership. McDATA extensively pre-tests its solutions to provide
IT organizations with the comprehensive tools, methodologies and
support essential to robust SAN implementation. McDATA distributes
its products through its OEMs, network of resellers and Elite Solution
Partners. McDATA and the McDATA logo are registered trademarks of
McDATA Corporation.
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 quickly 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 complete
the manufacturing review plan and the successful implementation
of an "outsourcing-focused" manufacturing model, 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 manufacturer,
our ability to expand our product offerings and any transition to
new products (such as higher port count products) 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 impact
and uncertainty of typically having most of the sales volume occur
in the last month and a significant amount in the last two weeks
of the fiscal quarter, the development of the storage area network
and director, switch and software markets, competition in the storage
area network and director, switch and software markets (including
competitive pricing pressures), one-time events and other important
risk factors disclosed previously and from time to time in our filings
at the US 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.
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