Best effort operations
We realize that the jobs you submit to UseGalaxy Canada are important to you. For that reason, we commit to making best efforts to keep the service as reliable and responsive as possible, and to keep your data intact.
Our team staff is spread across Canada with normal working hours usually covering week days from 9am to 8pm EST. During those hours we aim to triage tickets, tool and reference data requests within one to two business days. Resolution of tickets, requests, outages and issues will take longer outside normal office hours, on weekends, and on public holidays.
UseGalaxy Canada runs on research-grade Cloud infrastructures contributed by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. UseGalaxy Canada reliability and capacity may be impacted if these infrastructures unexpectedly become unavailable.
Service capacity
UseGalaxy Canada is underpinned by significant compute and storage capabilities, allowing you to scale analysis beyond your desktop computer. We periodically expand capacity, taking into account growth in users, jobs and community requests for new types of analysis that might need specialized hardware.
From time to time UseGalaxy Canada may reach capacity, usually resulting in longer job run times.
UseGalaxy Canada aspires to operate a “fair share” system, where capacity is distributed amongst researchers using the service. For that reason, we may at times work with researchers to halt and reconfigure jobs that are taking too large a share of service capacity.
Service lifetime
The service will continue for the lifetime of the resource allocation granted by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. This allocation has to be renewed every 3 years upon proving the needs and benefits to the Canadian research community. As of early 2024, the resources are garanteed for another 2 years, and we expect after this to be renewed for another 3 years with more or less resources depending on the demands and availability.
In case of expected future closure of service, we will inform our users at least a year prior to the closure if possible and provide with the necessary information and mechanisms on how to export your data from UseGalaxy Canada.
Maintenance
The maintenance and administration of UseGalaxy Canada is a balance between service uptime and the health of the service. From time to time, the service may become unavailable during planned or unscheduled maintenance events.
Planned maintenance
Notification of planned service unavailability will be made via a notice on the UseGalaxy Canada website and via email to registered account holders. The period of notice varies depending on the length of the planned service unavailability:
| Planned Downtime | Advanced Notice period |
|---|---|
| < 10 minutes | Without notice |
| 1 hour | 1 day |
| 1 day | 1 week |
| 1 week | 1 month |
Unscheduled maintenance
On rare occasions, the UseGalaxy Canada resource provider (DR Alliance of Canada) may need to perform urgent maintenance or suffer temporary shutdown for various reasons, resulting in UseGalaxy Canada service downtime outside of our scheduled maintenance windows. In this case UseGalaxy Canada will make every effort to give users as much information as possible and try to limit disruption.
Managing hosted data quotas
UseGalaxy Canada is not designed for long term storage of data. Please only host data for the period required for analysis, and export/download and delete your analyzed data. Any data marked by you as "deleted" will be permanently removed within 5 business days. If you decide to "purge" a dataset, it will be removed immediately and permanently.
Old data are periodically purged in line with the data retention period described in Data Policies. We will notify you via email with instructions on how to download your data ONE MONTH before purging your old data.
An increased data storage quota can be requested here Help/Request. Please provide a brief justification for your needs.
If your data is likely to be used by other researchers, you may request its addition to UseGalaxy Canada as reference or annotation data for community use. Reference and annotation data does not count towards your research data quota.
What happens when I go over my hosted data quota?
Your data and histories are still accessible, but you are not able to run new jobs or import more data.
