Features - Financial Plays Of The Week:

LUCENT AND McDATA EXPAND PARTNERSHIP

Lucent Technologies and McDATA Corporation, a world leader in open ultra-high availability storage networking solutions, has announced a joint development initiative that provides businesses with comprehensive solutions for storage networking both in and between data centers.

The solutions offer business continuity, disaster recovery, remote storage access, outsourced storage and other services to large-scale enterprises. Through a worldwide sales initiative, the companies are currently offering end-to-end solutions that can simplify overall network architecture and improve data protection across the network, while providing a range of flexible and scalable deployment options.

"Managing the massive amounts of data flowing across wide-area storage networks is a challenge for enterprises worldwide," said Sterling Perrin, senior research analyst for Optical Networks at IDC. "In partnering, Lucent and McDATA are making it easier for enterprises and service providers to implement complex, end-to-end SANs that extend from the enterprise into the metro and even across metros, and which consist of various types of storage, switching, and optical networking equipment."

Customers can leverage the storage networking expertise of McDATA with the carrier class network expertise of Lucent to consolidate their network infrastructure and protect vital data, ensuring business continuance and increasing the return on their investments in network infrastructure.

"Our alliance with McDATA addresses some of the high-growth opportunities we see in the marketplace, and it is significant step forward in the ability to easily and cost-effectively interconnect geographically dispersed data centers," said Frank Farese, vice president, Global Business Partners at Lucent. "With the new capabilities of our OptiStar EdgeSwitch 2.0 along with McDATA's suite of Intrepid Directors and Sphereon Fabric Switches and the rest of the Lucent portfolio, we can offer our joint customers solutions that create a unified end-to-end storage area network that provides value-added service intelligence and performance."

"Our customers have been impressed with the seamless, high-performance storage networking solutions we are able to offer with Lucent," said John Kelley, president and CEO, McDATA. "Our partnership with Lucent allows us to deliver solutions which positively demonstrate our networking expertise and technical knowledge. Working with Lucent, we have quickly been able to validate and bring to our customers a complete solution for converged storage networking over the WAN. Because Lucent is a McDATA OPENready Solution Partner, customers can be confident of full end-to-end network interoperability and solution readiness for real-world, ultra-high availability application environments."

The OptiStar EdgeSwitch is an integrated optical IP and storage router that extends Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) traffic, along with Ethernetbased LAN and network-attached storage traffic, over network backbones. The OptiStar EdgeSwitch can enable high storage application performance over regional to intercontinental distances.

An upcoming OptiStar EdgeSwitch release will offer Domain Virtualization technology to provide advanced inter-fabric routing and firewall capabilities for distributed SAN operations. With the ongoing growth of storage networks across the enterprise, Domain Virtualization will help take the complexity out of scaling fabrics while enabling vastly larger networks than were previously possible.

McDATA's Sphereon switches and Intrepid Director, an intelligent Director platform, surpass all solutions currently available on the market in terms of scalability, availability and ease of use. The Sphereon 4500 is the world's most flexible fabric switch and is designed from the ground up to address the needs of small to medium size enterprises.

Lucent and McDATA are also combining their strengths in other ways to enhance and extend data center internetworking solutions for enterprises and service providers. Additional areas of focus for the partnership include storage extension over DWDM using the Metropolis Enhanced Optical Networking (EON) platform, integrated security offerings with the VPN Firewall Brick family of products and McDATA's SANtegrityTM security suite, and end-to-end storage network management combining products such as McDATA's SANavigator* and Lucent's VitalSuite(tm) offerings. For more information on the OptiStar EdgeSwitch visit www.lucent.com/edgeswitch.

Lucent will be featuring a live demo of its secure storage networking over distance using Lucent's OptiStar EdgeSwitch, Domain Virtualization technology and VPN Firewall Brick* 1000 along with McDATA Sphereon fabric switches at the SuperComm show in Atlanta, Georgia from June 3, 2003 through June 5, 2003. The Lucent booth is #23325 in Hall B-4 of the Georgia World Congress Center.

About McDATA

McDATA is a world leader in open, 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.