Computers are provided with a totally ordered, durable shared log. Shared storage is used and can be directly accessed by the computers over a network. Append-log operations are made atomic in the face of failures by committing provisional append ordering information onto a log. The log may comprise multiple flash packages or non-volatile memory devices, referred to as segments, although any shared storage device(s) may be used. Each log record is a multi-page stripe, where each page of a stripe is written to a different segment. Fault-tolerant protocol variants append stripes to the log, such that stripes are totally ordered in the log and each stripe is written atomically.