From: young_r@eisner.decus.org
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 10:58 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Re: Spiralog. Re: Why are VMS disk copies so low relative to
other systems?

In article <mAkW3.407$LK3.15883@nuq-read.news.verio.net>, "Nikita V. Belenki" <kit@nospam.net> writes:
> Fred Kleinsorge wrote in message
> <3828532D.F98D8F1@star.enet.dec_nospam.com>...
> 
>>If your system has a power fail, or you simply turn it off, you quite
>>often end up with corrupt files - because you never got to flush the
>>cache.  The NT innovation was to implement NTFS so that *file system*
>>changes were logged, to reduce/eliminate the corrupt file systems that
>>happened on PCs when power was removed.
> 
> 
> By the way, what happened with Spiralog? Why it was discontinued?
> 

Kit,

	If you follow the links out our favorite site,
	you find:  (By the way, at http://www.openvms.digital.com/openvms
	with twice the VMS you gotta love it).

	http://www.openvms.digital.com/openvms/roadmap/sld016.htm

	"We will not be productizing Snapshot Services for OpenVMS. Instead, we
will be delivering enhancements to Volume Shadowing and
     the BACKUP utility on OpenVMS. These enhancements will allow customers to
do backups without shutting down the application and
     without a significant performance penalty. "

	While not quite answering "what happened to Sprialog", this is close.
	Sprialog is dead but out of that good things are coming...
	unfortunately we have to wait.  The hope was Snapshot Services,
	but as you can see it isn't coming to market.

	I've read elsewhere an outgrowth of Spiralog is XFC but don't
	have a reference handy to substantiate that claim.

	From that same URL:

"Extended File Cache (XFC) V1.0 (in Kestrel) will: 

     Continue to provide write through caching (synchronous write) for high
integrity and to be compatible with VIOC in a cluster 

     Provide read ahead caching on sequential files 

     Support for greater than 100 closed files in cache. Only limited by memory
size. "

	While painful for all of us, the reworking of Volume Shadowing
	and Backup is a very good thing and will be well worth the wait,
	IMHO.

				Rob
