In early March the EMBL-EBI data centre will be migrating to a new physical location. This will impact on the services that we can offer that are provided by the data centre during this time. There will be a complete shut-down of some services for over a week as the servers are disconnected, moved and reconnected in their new location, and there may be continued impacts as we reconfigure the services afterwards.
What will be unavailable?
We are still finalising what will be down at this time, as we reconfigure our offerings to provide the best service possible during this period. We will communicate this as soon as we know more, using the Ensembl blog site, our dev and announce mailing lists and our Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Why is this happening?
The EMBL-EBI data centres are moving to new premises. This means that the servers will be turned off, moved and reinstalled. While some of our services have alternative servers that can be used in the event of a data centre shutdown, some are only served by the single data centre and we have no way of providing them otherwise.
When exactly will this occur?
Shut-down will begin on the 2nd March. Because of the distance to travel and the complex nature of the servers that need to be reconnected in the right way, we anticipate that services will start to come back online from the 10th March. We will communicate when we know everything is going down, and when it is restored.
US east/US west/Asia mirrors are unaffected, correct?
Yes, they are some of the backups we have in place, and we will encourage people to use them. But some aspects may still be affected. We're still working it out.