最佳做法，PHP，每天跟踪数百万次展示

What do I have to do to make 20k mysql inserts per second possible (during peak hours around 1k/sec during slower times)? I've been doing some research and I've seen the "INSERT DELAYED" suggestion, writing to a flat file, "fopen(file,'a')", and then running a chron job to dump the "needed" data into mysql, etc. I've also heard you need multiple servers and "load balancers" which I've never heard of, to make something like this work. I've also been looking at these "cloud server" thing-a-ma-jigs, and their automatic scalability, but not sure about what's actually scalable.What do I have to do to make 20k mysql inserts