Doug Werth writes:

>Powerfail recovery  is just another feature that *used* to distinguish
>HP3000 systems from other computer systems.

This still seems to be a source of some confusion. What happened here is
that Curt's 987 had two batteries, but his 928 only had one. Naturally,
the 987 lasted longer.

In times past, systems used so much power that the best you could hope
for with a reasonable-sized battery was to keep the memory alive. Today,
systems are much less power-hungry, so that same reasonably-sized battery
can keep the whole system alive. The battery just lives in a UPS now
instead of inside the cabinet.

And the UPS solution is a much better one. Again, in times past, there
wasn't much point in keeping the system alive during a power failure,
because all the users, who were probably in the same building, would also
be without power. Today, just because I have a power failure here in
Phoenix doesn't mean that my users in Darwin and Oxford are without
power. To them, memory-only backup is no backup at all -- even if they
want to hang around waiting for power to come back in Phoenix, their
network connections will be gone when it does.

Now that HP is implementing the facility to run a command when the UPS is
about to shut down, it's even better. A memory-only backup facility is
the same as a crash if the battery energy is depleted. Now, we can do an
orderly shutdown before depletion.

The only thing we lose is the ability to do that powerfail demo. Sure, it
was fun, but this really is better for the users. It's a feature that
used to distinguish the HP3000 from other systems, but it's a feature
that's no longer needed.

-- Bruce


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Bruce Toback    Tel: (602) 996-8601| My candle burns at both ends;
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