November 16, 2011
Special Edition
This edition announces a system outage and addresses concerns regard the frequency of the outages.
In the TTB Newsletter, we compile the top TTB news of the week and other helpful information about the Bureau and the Federal alcohol and tobacco laws and regulations we enforce. Please send any questions or comments to the Executive Liaison for Industry Matters at IndustryLiaison@ttb.gov and/or StateLiaison@ttb.com. |
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System Outage Notice: implementation of formulas Online for nonbeverage formulas
Please be advised that due to the launch of Formulas Online for nonbeverage alcohol formulas, both Formulas Online and COLAs Online will be unavailable from 10 pm Eastern Time on Friday, November 18, 2011 to 6 am Eastern Time on Monday, November 21, 2011.
For more information about what the new release of Formulas Online will mean for its users, see What's New in Formulas Online 1.1.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, and appreciate your patience during this upgrade to Formulas Online.
"WHY DO YOU KEEP SCHEDULING all these system outages?"
Over the past few months TTB Online applications, including COLAs Online, Formulas Online, and Permits Online, have been unavailable to the public on several occasions, and some of our users have asked us, "Why all the outages?"
- Upgrades and Improvements in Usability
In some cases, we schedule outages so we can upgrade our existing online systems, like we will be doing for Formulas Online this weekend, or to perform required maintenance in order to preserve overall system reliability. We will schedule these outages periodically as we work to continuously improve our systems and advance their usability.
So we ask for your patience during these necessary outages and we assure you that we are committed to providing you with the most efficient and secure online applications as possible.
- Consolidations and Cost Savings
Another reason for system outages is cost savings. As part of our ongoing efforts to achieve budget efficiencies, we determined that we could save money by consolidating the IT data centers where all of our custom applications and internal IT systems are housed. This required shutting all systems down, packing them, moving them then unpacking and restoring them. Of course, one downside of this consolidation was that we had to shut down access to all TTB IT systems over two weekends. We tried to limit the impact on our users by scheduling the system outages over long holiday weekends, but we do understand that any outage can be frustrating and we apologize for any inconvenience this consolidation may have caused.
The good news is that the moves were accomplished without any hitches and all systems are up and running smoothly and we don't anticipate any more system outages for this purpose.