Media Temple, home of the Grid Server which I wrote about here, has just posted an excellent post on their blog, titled Anatomy of MySQL on the Grid Server. It

1. Acknowledge MySQL issues in the current grid server platform.
2. Talk about their old load balancing system for MySQL, and why it did not work.
3. Discuss their new VPS based MySQL solution that will be switched on in March.

Via TechCrunch, MediaTemple has introduced its Grid-Server hosting product, superseding their old shared hosting products.

It is basically a cluster of web servers/application servers connecting to a fast array of storage (SAN?), and load balancers or routers placed in front of the web servers to evenly distribute the requests across individual physical servers in the grid. A new measurement, Grid Performance Unit, is introduced to measure how much CPU time your account has used.

Michael Arrington has also interviewed the MediaTemple guys on TalkCrunch, talking about the ideas behind their latest offerings.