For giggles (and scalability reasons), we set up a Media Temple (mt) “gs” account – setting up some of our sites on their new Grid Server service plan. This morning, it all went to hell. By the afternoon, I started to get antsy – and blitzed a request in their general direction. I received a response quickly, which pretty much said that I wasn’t the only user having issues on the Grid today. Then, in the early evening, I received this update – which I share with you now, in case you’re also a Media Temple gs customer:

This update is intended to summarize the many smaller micro-updates and progress that has been made with this issue since 4:25pm.

- Issues were discovered with the new firmware patch that was provided to (mt) Media Temple this afternoon. This new patch, which was designed to solve the stability issues with our storage segment, introduced new issues. The patch solved the crashing issues, yet introduced performance problems and possible incompatibilities with our GRID technology.

- BlueArc impressively has responded expediently throughout the issue and has escalated (mt)’s issue to the highest level within the company. Constant communication between engineering departments has remained all day.

- During the diagnostic phase (mt) Media Temple found techniques to dramatically reduce disk I/O load from the web segment. This improvement has been scheduled to roll into GRID Master Release (v.1.1). This action has restored the web segment to full performance while the root is issue is discovered.

- Performance issues in the email segment continue to come and go, currently exhaustive work is being done in this area.

- Commitment has been made by both teams to work continuously until permanent resolution is made.

I’m not quite sure what all of that means, but… I sure hope it doesn’t happen again. I mean, I don’t expect much for such a small amount of money, but Media Temple (in my mind) has one of the best Web hosting reputations on the planet – which is largely why we’re dipping our digital toes in their waters. Things seem okay again, although my Comcrap connection has made the Internets close to unbearable.

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