The technology was used by Inktomi and lots of other dot-com startups. After that, cluster computing became pretty standard, at least in the first tier of computing, where you have what are called stateless nodes.
In the end, we wound up building something that was pretty impressive, but only for short periods of time. We'd get these incredible cost/performance demonstrations, but if everything wasn't perfect it wasn't such a wonderful system to use. We came out of that much more interested in dependability, reliability and ease of use as opposed to peak performance.
EET: So what are you working on now?
Patterson: We are focused on building smart tools to help operators run computers, especially systems that recover quickly. I'm trying to get companies to think of reboot time as something they can compare and compete on.
We've been building, with people at Stanford, prototypes for an undo/redo mechanism to let the operator of a large system go back in time, repair something and replay what happened during that time. That's relatively easy to do in a word processor but hard to do in a large server and storage system.
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