McDATA's Success to Continue as Fibre Channel Switch Market Grows.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 8, 2004

McDATA Fastest Growing Vendor in Fixed Port Switch Revenue; Maintains

Dominance in Director Market

McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq:MCDTA) (Nasdaq:MCDT), the expert provider of multi-capable storage networking solutions, today announced positive results from IDC's latest study on the state of the Fibre Channel Switch market, "Worldwide Fibre Channel Switch 2004-2008 Forecast and 2003 Vendor Market Share." Between 2002 and 2003, McDATA's overall FC switch revenue share increased 4.7 percentage points from 29.7 to 34.4 percent, and port shipment share increased from 22.5 to 27.7 percent.

"FC chassis switches accounted for almost all of the revenue growth in the overall FC switch market in 2003," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems research at IDC. "McDATA remains the market leader in this sector, shipping more than 50 percent of chassis switch ports."

The success of McDATA's family of Sphereon(TM) Fabric Switches also contributed to changes in the overall vendor market share distribution. McDATA's revenue share in the FC fixed port market rose from 9.4 to 19.7 percent, port shipment share increased from 8.7 to 16.8 percent. The award-winning Sphereon product-line, with features such as HotCAT(TM) non-disruptive online code activation and McDATA's exclusive, pay-as-you-grow FlexPort technology, is a perfect match for rapidly growing small and medium-sized business customer needs, and enterprise edge deployments.