EMC, the king of storage in 2000, owned 97 percent of the voting power in the company that wired its machines together. McDATA, based in Broomfield, Colorado, built director-class switches for storage area networks, or SANs. Its ED-5000 director sat at the center of a data center, linking hundreds of servers to shared disk arrays. Data was piling up faster than companies could manage it, and McDATA sold mostly through EMC and IBM.

Run Apart From EMC

McDATA had operated as a company separate from EMC since October 1, 1997, under a board with a majority of outside directors. Its pitch was size. One large switch with many ports cost less per port than a pile of small switches wired together to do the same job. EMC planned to hand its McDATA shares to EMC's own stockholders six to twelve months after the IPO, setting the company fully free.

Sold to the Rival

McDATA sold 12.5 million Class B shares at $28 on August 9, 2000, raising $350 million, and listed on Nasdaq as MCDT. With the over-allotment, net proceeds came to about $377 million. The storage switch market narrowed to a few players, and McDATA's closest rival was Brocade. Brocade agreed to buy McDATA for about $713 million in stock, and McDATA's shares left Nasdaq in January 2007.

Cover: Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery, Andrew Joseph Russell. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the Rocky Mountains (Broomfield, Colorado).