This will come as no surprise to anyone who has attempted to do a major IT upgrade over a weekend, even a long weekend. But only some of the FCC’s publicly accessible resources and databases are back online, missing the original completion target of this morning, Sept. 8. Some will require another 48 hours.
“Our servers left FCC headquarters in seven moving vans after midnight and arrived safely at the new commercial data center facility early Friday morning,” commission CIO David Bray wrote on a blog post today.
“While all the data and infrastructure arrived intact, upon arrival we discovered the need for some additional cabling to be done by our commercial partners that took longer than expected. Unfortunately, this delayed completion of all of the system upgrades — even with the FCC team working around the clock throughout the holiday weekend.”
But he said the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) is now available to the public, while the Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) was expected to be available yet today.
He said other systems should be available by Thursday morning. Those include the Consolidated Database System (CDBS). See the full list at bottom.
“With a massive server move of this scale — even with detailed planning, independent verification, and backup plans — the opportunity always exists for surprises, especially with legacy IT systems, nearly 400 program applications and hundreds of servers,” Bray wrote. He said an FCC team worked “day and night” over the holiday weekend and that the tasks including moving some 200 legacy servers from DC headquarters to a commercial service provider.
The move to a commercial service provider is intended to help reduce costs, improve resiliency and allow the FCC to shift legacy applications to the cloud.
The systems that it expects will be unavailable until 8 a.m. on Thursday, include, among others, the Universal Licensing System (ULS), the Equipment Authorization System (EAS), the Electronic Tariff Filing System (ETFS), the Experimental Licensing System (ELS), the Consolidated Database System (CDBS), the Licensing and Management System (LMS), the International Bureau Filing System (IBFS/MyIBFS), the Section 43.62 Online Filing System, theTower Construction Notification System (TCNS), the Antenna Structure Registration System (ASR), the Electronic Section-106 System (E-106), Fee Filer, the Commission Registration System (CORES), the 911 Reliability Certification System, and the National Broadband Map.
