Home to the Service Desk, IT Security and departmental support services.
Around 2008 it became clear that the rapid growth in both the size and complexity of EMBL-EBI’s data archives required a bespoke, in-house, software-defined object storage solution to ensure its availability, accessibility and recoverability, and the EMBL-EBI FIRE (File Replication) archive…
In Technical Services here at EMBL-EBI, we offer a graduate Help Desk Engineer scheme, whereby we employ IT graduates on fixed term three year contracts, to come and work on our IT Support Help Desk. This scheme has proven very successful, with the first two engineers recently completing their…
EMBL-EBI makes a vast quantity of biological data freely available to the global scientific community, via a number of online archives and analysis platforms. For all this data to be useful, the user needs to be able to find what they’re looking for logically, quickly and easily. To do this,…
Software development plays a significant role in the world of bioinformatics and modern life sciences research. Indeed, software (and hardware) engineers are responsible for providing the infrastructure that makes delivery of scientific services possible. However, career development often remains…
The Technical Service Cluster’s Cloud Consultants recently delivered their first Research Operations (ResOps) training session since February, at the request of our colleagues at EMBL Heidelberg. Originally planned as an in-person course, this was just one of the events that was postponed because…
In the spring of 2020, Google offered EMBL-EBI some temporary licenses for the online training platform, Coursera, as part of the growing collaboration between EMBL-EBI and Google Cloud. Ten licenses were made available for a period of 3 months, providing access to a selection of courses curated by…
For the IT support teams at EMBL-EBI, led by Coordinator Tahir Iqbal, 2020 started off just like any other year, with team members busily working on strategies and project planning. Back in January, the novel coronavirus was in the early phases of its ascendancy, and nobody knew for sure how it…
In the first of a series of technical staff profiles, we caught up with cloud computing maestro Tony Wildish, to try and find out what life in the Technical Services Cluster at EMBL-EBI is really like…
The mission of the Technical Services Cluster (TSC) is to deliver a broad range of high-quality IT services that support the research, service provision and administrative activities of EMBL-EBI. To provide the best possible service to all our users we need a formal and strategic approach to…
Migrating to the cloud has always proven problematic for the life science research community due to the need to access huge data-sets spread across different storage types in different locations, from a variety of different cloud environments. These use cases were the primary reason why, in 2016,…