Grid Improvements (GMR v.1.1) release announcement

(mt) Media Temple is proud to announce its latest version (GMR v.1.1) of the new (gs) Grid-Server hosting system. Combining several months of beta test usage along with the feedback and experiences of thousands of production users, our new release includes numerous user-requested features, fixes to over one hundred bug reports, and the inclusion of newly added levels of redundancy and stability. (GMR v.1.1) will begin being released on production Clusters inside the GRID Thursday 12/7/2006. A scheduled maintenance notice will follow including the details and time of the version release.

Highlights of (GMR v.1.1)
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• Sever count (400+). After the release of (GMR v.1.1), the most active cluster (Cluster1) will have a server count of over 400. This includes physical OS nodes and container OS nodes which increases thin-provisioning safety ratios and performance capacity.
• MySQL improvements. Includes new balancing technology (Tahiti v.0.5) developed by (mt) Media Temple which improves MySQL performance and stability. New auto-relocation features distribute MySQL performance into a newly developed MySQL farm-model inside the Grid. Ongoing development of the Tahiti framework will permit systems engineers to continue improving MySQL in-between GMR releases.
• Storage improvements. Includes a new storage architecture which provides more redundancy options in the event of hardware related issues occurring within a segment. Will include a new firmware release into current storage segment hardware which alleviates downtime causing memory leaks.
• Urchin improvements. Overhaul of the Urchin log processing system. Results in the correction of missing information in Urchin reports and significantly improves log crunching times. Provides future possibility of increasing frequency of report generation.
• Email improvements. Optimized email sub-systems improve overall mail experience by decreasing mail delivery time. Also corrects several bug reports; including SMTP related issues.
• Faster WebControl panel. Optimizations made to AC result in a 40% speed improvement in WebControl panel load times.
• SSL improvements. Faster SSL connection setup, and resolves the periodic ‘503 error’.
• Improved web segment load times. Numerous tuning and configuration changes enhance the speed in which web requests are processed and delivered.
• RoR Container improvements. Better support of Rmagick, new binary gems in response to customer requests, and several bug fixes.
• GPU report control page. New report within the WebControl panel will include details on current and historical GPU usage.
• Improved one-click install features.
• Migration Manager improvements. More edge cases detected, customer experience more consistent, monitoring and stability increased. Results in dramatically less migration related issues.
• New health and wellness monitors. In (GMR v.1.1) administration staff have several new Grid health checks and monitoring sub-systems which increase overall visibility into the system.

Items to look for in for future releases
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• Tahiti (v.0.6). Next version of MySQL system which includes even more reliability features and the option for MySQL containers.
• New Containers. Python containers with support for DJango and Trac. FlashMedia Server, ColdFusion, MySQL containers all in development.
• Enhanced sub-user control. Increases the granularity of permissions relating to sub-users. Will provide server administrator greater visibility into files and directory structures.
• MailProtect improvements. New anti-spam algorithms and techniques will improve the functionality and spam stopping capabilities of MailProtect.

We hope you that enjoy the improvements of (GMR v.1.1). (mt) Media Temple is excited now more than ever to continue delivering you new technologies like the (gs) Grid-Server. As with any new system we’ve released, real-world usage and customer feedback prove to be the most important and useful aspects of making our hosting systems as reliable as possible.

Also, we would like to especially thank our early adopters and first users of the (gs) Grid-Server. Your direct feedback and experiences have been incredibly helpful and our systems are now more powerful and running better with your help. Thank you again.