Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?
I pushed the idea of clusters at Sun.  I was the guy that designed Sunbox, which was a bunch of small cheap servers in a rack with an Kalpana ethernet switch in front of them and some vlan like stuff that made it appear like all the servers were on all the subnets (no router overhead, this back in the days of 20MHZ sparc chips, you actually noticed the router in the mix.)<p>Here&#x27;s a picture of it, written GNU pic (I say GNU because I got James to put in a construct called the `i&#x27;th so you could do for loops.  So the picture is adjustable, I can change the cpus variable and it will draw the picture with the new number of cpus.  That&#x27;s GNU pic unique.)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mcvoy.com&#x2F;lm&#x2F;sunbox.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mcvoy.com&#x2F;lm&#x2F;sunbox.pdf</a><p>It was a big failure.  For lots of reasons.  Scott (ceo) insisted that it ship with Solaris rather than SunOS, nobody wanted Solaris (somewhere I have a tape of me presenting it at the Moscone center and someone was beating me up about the Solaris issue, I finally lost it and said &quot;I know, I hate Solaris too, I was forced into it&quot;.  My boss said &quot;find all copies of that tape and destroy them&quot;.  Yeah Solaris).<p>Sun was focussed on SMP machines, they thought that would solve all the world&#x27;s problems, clusters just couldn&#x27;t do it.  Which completely missed the point.  Sunbox shipped with SMP machines in the rack, I think 4 processors sparcstation 10&#x27;s.<p>I pushed it along through sheer will power.  It was like a little dude pushing on an oil tanker, I actually pushed Sun a degree or two off their stated path.  But there was a ton of &quot;Larry is trying to kill SMP&quot; fud.<p>But it was too much.  I burned out and my boss, Ken Okin (fantastic dude for many reasons), said &quot;Go home, I&#x27;ll call you when I need you&quot;.  When I say &quot;too much&quot; I mean it.  I was either in, or about to be in, a nervous breakdown and Ken saw that.  I came back in after about 3 months and Ken took one look at me and said &quot;I said I&#x27;d call you, go home!&quot;.  Just to be clear, Sun was paying me to stay home.<p>So I did, for almost a year.  My job became playing pool, but that&#x27;s a story for another day (and probably boring to this crowd).<p>I did see my product manager years later, up in Tahoe skiing.  He came over, bought a beer, and said &quot;I guess you were right about that cluster thing&quot;.  This was after google did 10,000 machine clusters that worked really really well, way better than any single SMP machine hope to do.  Kudos to him for admitting it even if it was obvious.