National Advanced Systems has what it claims is the industry’s first expert system designed to predict imminent failures in large capacity disk drives. NAStrack is a combination of proprietary hardware and software which monitor’s seven critical parameters for the company’s Japanese drives, including environmental monitoring and head-disk assembly logic in order to identify trouble spots – and the company says it intends to install NAStrack on every NAS 7380 subsystem installed in the US. The system consists of a single board and software installed within the head of string drive. It monitors the parameters and if the data indicates the drive is not operating within normal limits that information is stored, to be fed on a daily basis over phone lines to the company’s central support base in San Diego, where a hardware specialist is alerted and a customer support engineer sent to the user site, hoping to get there before the disk drive fails. If a subsystem does fail, NAStrack, working with the engineer, can run up to 35 different remote diagnostics to facilitate quick repair. Shipments of NAStrack have already begun in the US, and the company is considering offering the service worldwide.
