Features - Storage Innovations:

McDATA RAISES THE BAR - AGAIN - WITH INTREPID 6140 DIRECTOR

McDATA Corporation, a worldwide leader in open, ultra high-availability storage networking solutions, has announced the worldwide availability of its Intrepid 6000 Series 140-port Director, an 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 one of 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."

Reliable And Safe: Ensuring Business Continuance

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.

Optimize Resources For Lower Costs

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.

Scalable And Flexible

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.

Minimize Risk And Protect Prior Investments

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.

Simple Design And Deployment

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.

Availability

The McDATA Intrepid 6140 is available now 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.