As part of the standard maintenance cycle, as usual there will be an extended shutdown of Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Services around the second week of December to carry out major maintenance.
This year there are additional major pieces of work to complete which mean more downtime than in previous years:
- Estates need to replace the transformer that failed earlier in the year, causing a widespread outage across BEAR Services and which has left the service exposed to power interruptions.
- Estates need to complete critical maintenance on the High Voltage power network on which the Vale depends. This work was scheduled for the summer but had to be postponed following the transformer failure in the data centre.
- We (ARC) need to carry out all of our normal annual maintenance tasks on the BEAR infrastructure.
This complex set of works affects BEAR but also means an extended power cut to the wider Vale site – Student Halls of Residence, Conference facilities, the Nursery, and a number of other buildings in addition to our data centre. The various stakeholders and Estates contractors are working together to agree a schedule. For BEAR, this means downtime is likely to run from Friday until the middle of the following week in December.
The complexity also means a second outage is likely to be needed early in the New Year.
We will provide actual dates as soon as they are known but in the meantime, please make plans to deal with the outage and particularly for any deadlines you may have that fall in the period from 13 December through to 10 January.
Note that this does not mean that BEAR services will be down from 13 December to 10 January, just that we think this is the period within which the downtimes will occur.