Credit Suisse Group Banks on McDATA to Save Time and Money

    Business Editors/High-Tech Editors

    BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 21, 2005--

    Greater Efficiency in Managing Data Growth and Related Expenses
    Leads Credit Suisse to Consolidate and Simplify Disparate SANs with
    McDATA Intrepid(R) Directors and Sphereon(TM) Fabric Switches

    Credit Suisse Group, a leading financial services firm managing more than $976 billion in assets, selected McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT), a leading provider of storage networking solutions, to assist them in staying competitive and to better serve its customers. New applications and tools such as online banking, data warehousing and other applications have spurred 100 percent data growth rates. In order to meet that demand today and grow into the future, Credit Suisse consolidated its storage area network (SAN) with McDATA solutions to save costs on its infrastructure and management of its networks.
    Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Credit Suisse provides private and corporate clients with financial advisory services, banking products as well as pension and insurance solutions. Employing over 60,000 people worldwide, Credit Suisse also operates one of the largest data centers in Europe. To further improve both storage network scalability and availability of information to its internal customers, Credit Suisse decided to implement a new SAN infrastructure to meet their operational, technical and financial objectives.
    "We were confronted with enormous data growth and had to find a way to deal with it while lowering data management costs," said Andreas Soltermann, assistant vice president for IT systems engineering at Credit Suisse. "McDATA's storage experts helped us meet our networking goals in consolidating the disparate SAN islands into a highly available and large network. This is a huge benefit for us because it is the enabler and basis for all future projects and investments. Now we can instantly fulfill upcoming departmental requirements."
    Credit Suisse's former Fibre Channel switch-based storage network, composed of independent SAN islands, was not utilizing resources to full capacity and had other limitations, such as different SANs for disk and tape to manage. The new architecture based on a McDATA solution reduced the number of SANs into one large dual fabric network interconnecting two disparate locations and a total 9 server rooms.
    "McDATA's multi-vendor interoperable, core-to-edge solution enabled Credit Suisse's IT personnel to manage fewer fabrics and provide them with a disaster recovery service that meets their strict requirements. Not only are their storage resources more adequately utilized, we saved them money as well," said Georg Bartz, vice president of EMEA sales and services for McDATA. "While this is a grand-scale implementation, McDATA's storage experts help our partners and customers match solutions to fit specific business needs."
    The solution saves the company a substantial amount of money per year by utilizing McDATA Intrepid(R) Directors at the core and edge as well as Sphereon(TM) Fabric Switches at the edge to interconnect small server rooms. The integrated McDATA-based infrastructure connects more than 400 Sun Solaris and Windows servers to storage subsystems from IBM and HDS, as well as more than 50 STK tape drives.

    About McDATA (www.mcdata.com)

    McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA)(Nasdaq: MCDT) is the only data infrastructure solutions provider that can deliver a Global Enterprise Data Center -- a globally connected, centrally managed and highly optimized data network. With more than 20 years of storage networking experience, McDATA is trusted in the world's largest data centers, connecting more than two-thirds of all networked data and enabling information access anytime, anywhere.

    About Credit Suisse Group

    Credit Suisse Group is a leading global financial services company headquartered in Zurich. It provides private clients and small and medium-sized companies with private banking and financial advisory services, and pension and insurance solutions from Winterthur. In the area of investment banking, it serves global institutional, corporate, government and individual clients in its role as a financial intermediary. Credit Suisse Group's registered shares (CSGN) are listed in Switzerland and in the form of American Depositary Shares (CSR) in New York. The Group employs around 60,000 staff worldwide. As of December 31, 2004, it reported assets under management of CHF 1,220.7 billion.

    Forward-Looking Statements

    This press release contains statements about expected future events that are forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties. Readers are urged to consider statements that include the terms "believes", "belief", "expects", "plans", "objectives", "estimates", "anticipates", "intends", "targets", or the like to be uncertain and forward-looking. Factors that could cause actual results to differ and vary materially from expectations include, but are not limited to, McDATA's relationships with EMC, IBM and HDS and the level of their orders, aggressive price competition by numerous other SAN and IP switch suppliers, OEM qualification of our new products, manufacturing constraints and other risk factors that are disclosed in McDATA's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These cautionary statements by McDATA should not be construed as exhaustive or as any admission regarding the adequacy of disclosures made by McDATA. All cautionary statements should be read as being applicable to all forward-looking statements wherever they appear. McDATA does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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CONTACT: McDATA Media: Jil Backstrom, 720-558-4774 press.release@mcdata.com or Investors: Renee Lyall, 720-558-4629 renee.lyall@mcdata.com

KEYWORD: COLORADO SWITZERLAND INTERNATIONAL EUROPE Technology_IT INDUSTRY KEYWORD: HARDWARE BANKING SOFTWARE MARKETING AGREEMENTS SOURCE: McDATA

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