I heard on good authority that one of the earliest implementations of consensus at Google involved Sanjay Ghemawat tangentially. Sanjay's PhD on Harp, with Barbara Liskov, had also been based on Viewstamped Replication, and so, internally, this became the first flavor at Google. Later, it would come to be referred to externally as Paxos, only because that was more well known at the time.
