Features - Financial Plays Of The Week:

MCDATA AGREES TO ACQUIRE NISHAN SYSTEMS AND SANERA SYSTEMS

McDATA Corporation announced definitive agreements to acquire Nishan Systems, a privately held company and the world's first supplier of native IP storage networking solutions; and Sanera Systems, a privately held company and provider of highly scalable and reliable enterprise storage networking solutions.

Separately, McDATA announced that it has entered into an agreement with Aarohi Communications to provide technology for McDATA's intelligent switch platforms. These transactions deliver key capabilities in scalability, internetworking and intelligence that strengthen McDATA's leading portfolio of multi-capable storage networking solutions.

"We are pleased to announce the acquisition of Nishan Systems and Sanera Systems. The powerful combination of Nishan and Sanera's advanced technologies with McDATA's strong leadership and expertise will allow us to provide customers with unprecedented value, choices and solutions delivered seamlessly from a trusted and reputable partner," said John Kelley, president and CEO of McDATA. "McDATA is changing the future of storage networking."

"In an era of storage and server consolidation, enterprises are rethinking their storage infrastructures. They want more robust storage capabilities that they can consistently leverage across their enterprise," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC. "Today's moves are a clear sign that McDATA intends to play an expanded role in helping enterprises reach this goal."

With these three announcements McDATA creates unprecedented value to its customers by providing seamless best-of-breed solutions, accelerates and solidifies its leadership and vision of a real-time storage services infrastructure, and establishes a foundation for growth and leadership.

"Verizon has enjoyed a very positive, long-term relationship with McDATA," said Kevin Shine, director of storage services at Verizon. "We are excited about this new offering because it will afford companies like us a tremendous amount of scalability and manageability for large, enterprise storage networks."

McDATA customers are ensured seamless integration of their storage networks with complete backward and forward compatibility with McDATA's current and future product line. McDATA's expanded portfolio will allow customers to seamlessly build and grow their storage services infrastructure in several dimensions simultaneously through enhanced:

• Scalability: Enabling customers to reduce complexity and increase asset utilization, and interconnect multi-vendor and multi-application SAN islands through partitioning.
• Internetworking: Enabling multi-protocol SAN routing, barrier-free distance solutions that provide enhanced business continuance and disaster recovery, and iSCSI solutions.
• Intelligence: Enabling data movement applications to migrate to the network, and reduced operating costs through policy-based controls.

In addition to the above, McDATA's Centralized Management and Services Platform (SANavigator and Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager) will be extended to support all of these new technologies and services, offering an unparalleled end-to-end software management solution that extends from entry-level iSCSI devices to data center class switching. As a result, McDATA will offer the only SAN management software solution that supports storage infrastructures from workgroups and medium enterprises to data centers to globally networked storage services.

"McDATA has been a strategic partner with HDS for several years, and this announcement further enhances that relationship," said Marlene Woodworth, executive vice president and general manager of global marketing & operations at Hitachi Data Systems. "McDATA's broad-based product portfolio makes it a key enabler to our software and hardware strategies."

"Many end-users have deployed multiple SAN islands in order to limit complexity or prevent the propagation of faults. However, such environments have proven to be relatively inefficient," said Eric Sheppard, senior analyst with IDC. "Today's announcement gives McDATA a family of products that will help end-users build more efficient SANs and, where appropriate, consolidate their infrastructure."

About McDATA

McDATA is the expert provider of Multi-Capable Storage Networking Solutions -- hardware, software and services -- that enable partners and customers around the world to reduce the total cost of storage management today, and be ready to adapt to the real-time information demands of tomorrow. Installed in over 8,000 data centers worldwide, McDATA solutions are at the heart of more than 80 percent of Fortune 100 storage network data centers, powering the latest e-business applications, customer databases, financial traffic and other mission-critical data. Customers leverage McDATA's multi-capable solutions to realize immediate cost savings, reduce their investment risk, ensure the continuity of their operations and adapt to changing business requirements. For more information visit www.mcdata.com.