Sindice downtime notice

We’re talking about downtime again on the Sindice project but this time it’s not due to climate change or some other unforeseen event. Our datacentre cooling system is getting a major upgrade. Unfortunately, due to the scale of this upgrade (the existing cooling system which takes up a significant area of the datacentre needs to be removed, and a new set of units need to be installed) - we need to bring down everything running in the datacentre.

While technically possible to host a second Sindice site in a second datacentre (we do have access to such a datacentre) - it’s not a scenario we have examined in detail to date due to the overall high availability of our current datacentre. In addition, Sindice currently runs on 14 servers - meaning we’d have to have 14 servers sitting around in standby mode. While we’d like to have 100% availability through fail-over, we prefer to offer the higher performance on a day to day basis using those 14 servers in other ways (including a new Hadoop cluster which we’re in the process of bringing online - more about that in a future posting).

In summary, the current schedule for our datacentre is to be down from 0000 GMT, 05-Mar (Friday) to 08-Mar (Monday). We’re hoping the people working on the datacentre upgrades can get things done sooner but the schedule is pretty aggressive already. Obviously if we get things back up sooner, we’ll let you know.

If you have any further queries on this downtime, please leave a comment or contact us via the Sindice Developers group.