San Francisco, CA and Broomfield, CO — March 13, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, Inc., the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks (WANs), and McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT), the leading provider of storage networking solutions, announced today that the two companies have signed a strategic OEM agreement in which McDATA will re-brand and sell Riverbed's wide-area data services (WDS) Steelhead® appliance product under its new SpectraNet family name as part of McDATA's ROC (remote office consolidation) offering. Branded the SpectraNet WDS Accelerator, the WDS solution is the first offering in a family of advanced data consolidation services that McDATA is bringing to market.

The SpectraNet WDS Accelerator is a network appliance that lets distributed enterprises consolidate remote office data and infrastructure to the data center, improving data protection, reducing costs and assuring real-time access to business information. It accelerates all applications by as much as 100 times, using TCP over the WAN.

"We spent a year carefully evaluating vendors in the application and WAN acceleration space and chose to partner with Riverbed® for our ROC (remote office consolidation) offering," said Todd Oseth, chief operating officer, McDATA. "Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance product family is best able to meet customer requirements for remote office application performance and consolidation of data. With the introduction of the SpectraNet WDS Accelerator powered by Riverbed, we are able to deliver to our enterprise customers the highest-performing and most complete ROC solution available today."

The SpectraNet WDS Accelerator will be sold as the WAN data services component of McDATA's ROC solution�a complete set of products and services that lets companies consolidate, centrally manage and protect remote office data without slowing the pace of real-time business.

"Remote office consolidation is a business problem that requires a holistic approach," said Joe Skorupa, research director, Gartner. "To succeed, enterprises must choose solutions that address all data access needs of the remote office�not just remote file access. And, once remote office data is centralized, you can't stop there. Companies need to think through how the additional data will impact their existing SAN, backup and disaster recovery, and bandwidth infrastructures in order to effectively manage the newly centralized data."

McDATA distribution includes direct sales and sales through McDATA's reseller/VAR channel. The offering is immediately available from McDATA in North America and Europe with future plans to expand the offering into Asia Pacific.

"Our relationship with McDATA is very complementary," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO of Riverbed. "We share a common belief that to address customer needs, remote office consolidation solutions must be multi-faceted and simultaneously address network, application, and storage issues. McDATA is unique in its in-depth understanding of enterprise customers and the need for data consolidation and remote office enablement. And, their top-notch services capabilities are industry-leading."

"To simplify management and reduce costs, we planned to consolidate servers from ten of our remote sites," said Eric Nichols, CIO at Solutia. "We have over 6000 employees and operate 40 offices throughout North America. In our competitive market we need to be as cost-effective as possible and simplifying IT by centralizing servers is one of the key tools at our disposal. We deployed the Steelhead appliances and saw an immediate drop in our WAN traffic. The Riverbed Steelhead appliances allowed us to meet our strategic goals. We simplified IT and significantly reduced costs�all without impacting the user experience."

McDATA (Nasdaq: MCDTA/MCDT) is the leading provider of storage networking solutions, helping customers build, globally connect, optimize and centrally manage data infrastructures across SAN, MAN and WAN environments. With nearly 25 years experience developing SAN products, services and solutions, McDATA is the trusted partner in the world's largest data centers, connecting more than two-thirds of all networked data.

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. The Wall Street Journal named Riverbed the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/ Broadband/Internet category. In addition, InfoWorld has named Riverbed's Steelhead appliance "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006, as the "Best WAN Accelerator". Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed.

For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

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Media Contacts:

Alan Saldich
Riverbed Technology
(415) 247-7308
alan@riverbed.com

Kim Kapustka
K2pr
(650) 685-6342
kim@k2pr.com

 

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