CHANTILLY, VA -- Network Storage Solutions (NSS), a leading provider of high-performance network attached storage (NAS) systems, announced major upgrades and price reductions for its NASengine. The upgraded NASengine, which is shipping today, includes an Intel Pentium III processor operating at 1 gigahertz (GHz), doubles the ECC SDRAM supported to 4GB, and quadruples PCI bus bandwidth. The new model also features externally accessible, redundant, hot-swap fans in a slim 1U package. The company also announced a price reduction of nearly 50 percent for the product. NSS's NAS products run the optimized SPANStor appliance kernel, developed specifically for high-performance network data access. "Our customers continue to demand the highest performing, most cost-effective network attached storage appliances on the market," said Brad Clemmons, President and CEO of Network Storage Solutions. "This new offering demonstrates our commitment to delivering the best in departmental and enterprise-class NAS devices." The company's NASengine is an integral part of the NSS Thunderbolt storage solution, providing as much as 1.8TB of storage in only 4U of rack space and up to 5.4TB of storage in a standard configuration. NSS is the only NAS vendor that offers worldwide service and support through Hitachi Data Systems. NSS Thunderbolt was recently recognized by Network Computing magazine as the NAS Product of the Year. A one terabyte Thunderbolt NAS system configured with an active/active Ultra-160 RAID storage module and two NASengines in a failover configuration sells for under $50,000 dollars, making it the best network storage value available today. With the exceptional price-performance, the NASengine is also part of an exceptional low-cost departmental or enterprise NAS failover solution, which ensures users have high-availability to their data. Because NSS is committed to an open architecture and uses only industry standard hardware, its products are highly scalable and offer enhanced investment protection to its customers. Even in today's weak economy, companies recognize that addressing mounting storage demands remains critical to core business functions and to continued success. In fact, analyst group IDC estimates the NAS market will grow from nearly $2 billion in 2000 to $14.7 billion worldwide in 2004 (`Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Forecast & Analysis, 1999-2004' - IDC, December 2000). NSS' open source data storage solutions are exceptionally well suited for ISPs in addition to customers in the CAD/CAM/CAE, streaming media/content, and graphics/pre-press markets.