I've got a few emails from people who asked about the commit and consensus protocols (Paxos, 3PC etc.) mentioned in the previous post.
I was going to write something up but then I find a very good overview by Mark MC Keown which provides "A brief history of Consensus, 2PC and Transaction Commit". This short writeup provides links to the most important papers like the Fischer, Lynch and Paterson (FLP) "Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process", Jim Gray (who, unfortunately, was lost at see earlier this year)  and Leslie Lapmort's "Consensus on Transaction Commit". In addition to Mark's post and all the papers there you may want to check out the presentation Jim and Leslie made on paxos commits

By the way, if on the other hands, you already know all this (and a little more) than check out Werner Vogel's (Amazon CTO) blog as there's a interesting  job opening for you there