But now it seems as though there has been a resurrection of sorts (I guess I should have paid attention in March). See for example: SRA Home where it is stated that
"Recently, NCBI announced that due to budget constraints, it would be discontinuing its Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and Trace Archive repositories for high-throughput sequence data. However, NIH has since committed interim funding for SRA in its current form until October 1, 2011. In addition, NCBI has been working with staff from other NIH Institutes and NIH grantees to develop an approach to continue archiving a widely used subset of next generation sequencing data after October 1, 2011.We now plan to continue handling sequencing data associated with:RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, and epigenomic data that are submitted to GEOGenomic and Transcriptomic assemblies that are submitted to GenBankGenomic assemblies to GenBank/WGS16S ribosomal RNA data associated with metagenomics that are submitted to GenBankIn addition, NCBI will continue to provide access to existing SRA and Trace Archive data for the foreseeable future. NCBI is also continuing to discuss with NIH Institutes approaches for handling other next-generation sequencing data associated with specific large-scale studies."
Well I'll be. I guess it is back at least for now.