BROOMFIELD, Colo. – October 16, 2002 – McDATA® Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT), the worldwide leader in open, ultra high-availability storage networking solutions, today announced it has received overwhelmingly positive responses to its recently announced Intrepid(TM)  6140 Director. Companies that have deployed McDATA’s ultra high-availability, 140-port Director have enjoyed a flexible, secure solution that provides significant returns on their investments, industry-leading port density, improved application performance, simplified management of their storage networks, and a protocol-independent design that ensures a future-proof SAN that seamlessly integrates emerging technologies.

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. Thousands of McDATA Intrepid 6140 and 6064 Directors have been deployed in the world’s largest data centers to ensure business continuity, minimize risk and protect investments, simplify deployment of storage networks, and provide the ultimate platform for unrivaled scalability and flexibility.

Kindred Healthcare Inc.
Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Kindred Healthcare employs about 53,000 people who care for more than 34,000 patients and residents each day. As a healthcare provider, Kindred is required to comply with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPA). HIPA, in part, requires healthcare organizations to retain certain patient records for long periods of time, which significantly adds to the volume of stored data, sometimes straining IT budgets.

To meet HIPAA compliance requirements while mitigating the resulting rise in IT costs, Kindred has begun an aggressive storage centralization process. Key to that process is Kindred’s investment in storage area networking (SAN) technology. The company has standardized on McDATA SAN solutions and has recently deployed McDATA’s new Intrepid 6140 Director to meet the company’s business requirements, as well as its IT requirements of scalability, availability and performance.

“We have close to 600 fibre channel ports on our data center floor, and they’re all connected through McDATA Directors. We’re seeing fairly rapid growth through centralization, normal business growth and acquisitions, and we’re having to scale our SAN to keep up,” said Jim Borden, corporate manager of storage management at Kindred Healthcare. “McDATA’s Intrepid 6140 is an ideal core building block for us to scale our infrastructure without having to compromise on connectivity. It gives us the ultra high-availability characteristics we require with the high port count that will allow us to keep pace with rapid growth.”

McDATA is committed to helping customers unleash the power of their information. This is realized by defining, enabling and accelerating the migration to an intelligent infrastructure.

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)
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.