EWEEK TAPS MCDATA'S SPHEREON 4500 FOR ANALYST'S CHOICE AWARD.

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BROOMFIELD, Colo., Feb. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall-AsiaNet/ -- McDATA(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA, MCDT), the worldwide leader in open, ultra-high availability storage networking solutions, announced today that eWeek Magazine has given the Sphereon 4500 fabric switch its coveted Analyst's Choice Award. This is a prestigious distinction, awarded only once or twice a year for all product groups. eWeek Labs rated the 4500 "best-in-class" and grades the 4500's key performance indicators of usability, capability and scalability as "excellent." The review appears in the January 20, 2003 issue of eWeek.

"McDATA Corp.'s Sphereon 4500 Fabric Switch Fibre Channel switch blends manageability and high port density into a powerful package that is impressive enough to earn eWeek Labs' Analyst's Choice distinction," Henry Baltazar, Senior Analyst at eWeek, said in the review. "(McDATA's FlexPort technology) allows IT managers to maintain switches without being forced to temporarily bring down their SAN (storage area networks). Considering that the Sphereon 4500 is an entry- to mid-level switch, we were surprised that it includes this degree of functionality ... Using this feature, an IT manager can easily compensate for bandwidth bottlenecks between switches by simply dedicating more ports ... The Sphereon 4500 is easy to set up, and the GUI is easy to navigate."

"We are proud to be recognized by a publication as respected and widely-read as eWeek with their rarely awarded Analyst's Choice distinction," said Doug Rainbolt, vice president of the switch product group at McDATA. "We are very pleased with the wide market acceptance and recognition we've received from our customers and partners, as well. Everything we do at McDATA, we do with our customer's interests in mind, first. The Sphereon 4500 is a natural extension of that philosophy and represents the next step in McDATA's quest to deliver to customers an extensible, open, automated infrastructure."

The Sphereon 4500 is the world's only 24-port SAN switch and offers the highest port density in the industry. It delivers "connectivity on demand" in 8-port increments through McDATA's exclusive FlexPort Technology, and allows small-to-midsize companies to build scalable, reliable and easy-to-manage storage networks with the most cost-effective SAN switch on the market. Customers want simplicity through management, so McDATA has packaged every Sphereon 4500 with its all-new, web-based SANpilot(TM) management software, which provides all the features necessary to easily manage small SAN fabrics.

About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA, MCDT) is the worldwide leader in open, ultra-high 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 ...