With Amdahl Corp’s new Expert Services Facility for users of its 5995M mainframes and of the 6100 Storage Processor (CI No 1,761), a comprehensive service environment is created by linking Amdahl products together at a customer site over a local network with a link to Amdahl’s expert systems, information gathering tools and maintenance databases: the company says that this establishes a central point of access for servicing multiple products, gives customers the flexibility to perform scheduled maintenance at times better tailored to their system availability needs, and cuts downtime by enabling many service functions to be automated and streamlined; it makes extensive use of expert systems to collect and analyse service data and anticipate and resolve problems automatically, with faults that cannot be immediately corrected automatically handed to Amdahl’s support services staff; the facility will be offered as standard on the 5995Ms beginning in the fourth quarter and on the 6100 Storage Processors in first quarter 1992.
