BROOMFIELD, Colo. – October 16, 2002 – McDATA® Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT),the worldwide leader in open, ultra high-availability storage networking solutions, today announced that its award-winning SANavigatorâ storage network management software is lowering IT costs and improving business efficiencies for companies of all sizes, including Boeing Company, Pier 1 Imports, St. John’s Health System and Bank of New York.

SANavigator greatly simplifies storage network management and ensures that a customer’s SAN is performing optimally, improving reliability, maximizing resources and ensuring a greater return on investment (ROI). This efficient, open-system platform provides a comprehensive, intuitive set of management tools, allowing IT administrators to optimize the capabilities of their storage networks while automating many of the day-to-day management tasks.

“McDATA’s SANavigator is committed to delivering customers an open, standards-based storage network management platform, which is a key component in the migration to an intelligent storage infrastructure,” said Robert Wright, McDATA vice president and SANAvigator Inc. general manager. “As a leader in implementing a CIM-based architecture with the release of SANavigator 3.0, we are continuing to work with CIM provider companies to fully develop and evolve the Bluefin specification and provide more robust CIM support within our application.”

SANavigator 3.1 is the latest line in McDATA’s suite of storage management software. SANavigator addresses the entire lifecycle of a SAN, from fabric planning and device discovery to storage network management and policy-based automation. SANavigator is another example of McDATA’s commitment to providing customers technology that allows for maximum flexibility, reliability, resource optimization, and cost efficiency.

The Boeing Company
The world’s leading aerospace company with 2001 revenues of $58 billion, Boeing maintains a corporate data center in Mesa, Ariz., where the company operates a complex, multi-vendor SAN comprised of Directors, fibre channel switches, HBAs and servers. As is common at most corporations today, the IT staff is dealing with budgetary constraints while the amount of data they’re required to manage constantly increases.

In order to deal with this complexity, Boeing needed a comprehensive, easy-to-use SAN management tool with the ability to support multi-vendor fabrics was necessary. Boeing evaluated several products on the market but chose McDATA’s SANavigator for its comprehensive management capabilities such as performance monitoring, asset management and policy-based notifications.

Since its implementation, SANavigator has saved Boeing approximately $340,000, by streamlining management of the storage network and preventing unnecessary purchases.

“Instead of purchasing more switches, HBAs and other equipment because we thought we had reached the capacity of our current infrastructure, SANavigator provided us a detailed view into our network and showed us where we could make adjustments in order to optimize our current resources,” said Margo White, systems administrator at Boeing. “Also, the time it takes to administer our SAN environment has been cut in half, from 10 hours per week to less than five hours a week using SANavigator.”

The Boeing SAN employs an ultra high-availability McDATA Intrepid 6064 Director and four 16-port switches. Currently, the SAN is not configured as a true fabric; instead, the Director is used to provide bulletproof connectivity to mission-critical information, while the switches are used to provide connectivity to the data center’s tape storage. IT managers at Boeing have plans to migrate the current SAN configuration into a true fabric, with the McDATA Intrepid Director at the core and the switches at the edge. SANavigator will provide Boeing unprecedented levels of fabric management once this multi-vendor fabric is achieved.

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.

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 ability to quickly integrate SANavigator and ramp 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 2 Gb/s and 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 switch markets, competition in the storage area network and switch markets, one-time events and other important risk factors disclosed previously and from time to time in our filings at the U.S. 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.