[ensembl-announce] Ensembl reduced functionality: 16th-25th March 2020

[Ben Moore]

Hi All,

During March (16th-25th) the EMBL-EBI data centre will be migrating to a new physical location resulting in a period of reduction in availability and functionality in a number of Ensembl services.

What will be affected?

There will be a temporary loss of all tools, including VEP and BLAST, at the beginning and end of the migration period. Jobs will not be saved during the whole migration period.
Accounts will not be available
BLAT will not be available
Vertebrate archives from e88 to e98 inclusive and all non-vertebrate archives will not be available
Our FTP site (ftp.ensembl.org) will be served from an alternative server at ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/ensemblorg/

Please see below for more details and ways to mitigate this downtime. If your service is not listed above then you should assume it will be available during this period.

VEP and other tools

We have an alternative server set up for VEP and other tools, such as BLAST, Assembly Converter and the LD Calculator. It is not possible for jobs to be copied between these servers. This means that if you have jobs saved to your session or account prior to the start of migration, you will not be able to see them during the migration, but they will come back once normal service resumes. Similarly, any jobs you run during the migration period will disappear when we return to the normal servers.

We recommend downloading the data from any jobs you wish to keep before the migration occurs, and during this period. Since accounts will not be available, you cannot save to your account.

We will advertise the time of the switch over in advance as any jobs that are running when it happens will be lost. We recommend that you resubmit any lost jobs after the switch. We will close the input forms so you cannot start any new jobs in the hour before the switch, but some larger jobs may still be running from before this.

If you are using the offline version of tools, such as the VEP, these will not be affected.
Accounts and configurations
If you have an Ensembl account <http://www.ensembl.org/Help/View?id=473>, this will not be accessible during the migration, as these are not enabled on our back-up servers. You will not be able to access any saved bookmarks, jobs, custom tracks or configurations, or save any bookmarks, jobs, custom tracks or configurations within Ensembl during this time.

Our main servers and back-up servers will not communicate with each other. This means that if you have a session running at the time when we switch between the servers, any configuration you have set up will not be saved and you will need to reconfigure when you refresh or return to the page. This includes any custom data <http://www.ensembl.org/info/website/upload/index.html> tracks that you are viewing in Ensembl, which will need to be re-attached. We recommend taking a screenshot of your current configuration so that it can be easily replicated.
BLAT
The BLAST-like alignment tool, BLAT, which is the default nucleotide sequence search tool used by BLAST/BLAT in Ensembl, will not be available during the migration. Jobs will default to BLAST instead, which may mean jobs take longer to run. The BLAST/BLAT tool will experience the same server shift as VEP.
Archives
Some of our archive sites will be completely unavailable. You will not be able to access any archive websites for non-vertebrates. For vertebrates, archives e88-e98 inclusive will be inaccessible.
FTP
If you download flat files for your large scale analysis from our FTP site <http://www.ensembl.org/info/data/ftp/index.html>, you will find that the usual site is not available. You will instead be able to access these from ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/ensemblorg/, where you will find the files organised into the same structure. 

This means that any direct links to the FTP site, both from our own site and any you have saved, will not work, but you can access the same files by changing “ftp.ensembl.org/pub/” in your URL to “ftp.ebi.ac.uk/ensemblorg/pub/”, for example “ftp.ensembl.org/pub/current_fasta/homo_sapiens/cdna/Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.cdna.all.fa.gz” will not work, but “ftp.ebi.ac.uk/ensemblorg/pub/current_fasta/homo_sapiens/cdna/Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.cdna.all.fa.gz” will.

This mirror of our flat files will remain active after the migration should you wish to use this server to access our data. 

Why is this happening?
The EMBL-EBI <https://www.ebi.ac.uk/> data centres are moving to new premises. This means that the servers will be turned off, physically 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 16th 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 25th March. We will communicate when things go down and as they are restored, using our blog site <http://www.ensembl.info/2020/02/18/reduced-functionality-16th-25th-march-2020/>, our dev and announce mailing lists <http://www.ensembl.org/info/about/contact/mailing.html> and our Twitter <https://twitter.com/ensembl> and Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/Ensembl.org> accounts.

Best wishes

Ben
On behalf of the Ensembl team

Ben Moore
Ensembl Outreach Officer

European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge
CB10 1SD
UK

bmoore at ebi.ac.uk
+44 (0)1223 494265

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