The Grill: The FEC's 'nerdy data guy' tells all

Computerworld - The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is charged with tracking, reporting on and investigating anything to do with presidential and congressional campaign finance. A big and relatively new part of its charter is to provide campaign finance data to citizens via its Web site.

James Allen, who manages IT infrastructure for the organization, discussed what it takes to keep up with the ins and outs of campaign finance. As he says, "I'm the nerdy data guy, not a politician."

You've got a data center at the FEC in Washington, and you contract with an external vendor to run servers for you out of Waltham, Mass., and Herndon, Va. How do all these pieces work together? Here at the commission, we have a small data center -- roughly 90 servers, a mixture of Unix and Windows. Our Unix systems handle Oracle databases; the Windows servers handle file shares, SQL databases, the Lotus Notes e-mail backbone and various support functions for the commission. I have a staff of four people to make sure all our internal servers are operational, have the proper storage and that patching is maintained. Another group of people deals with desktop issues.

Dossier

Name: James Allen

Title: Infrastructure branch manager, IT division

Organization: Federal Election Commission

Location: Washington

Favorite nonwork pastimes: Kayaking, hiking and reading

Philosophy in a nutshell: "Always do your best. Don't give up."

Four people he'd like to invite to dinner: Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Mahatma Gandhi and Stephen Hawking

Favorite vice: "An occasional glass of wine."

Great read: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

Our vendor, Savvis, hosts servers for us in Waltham that handle the public-facing aspects of what we do -- the data we provide the public. So they maintain our Web servers, database servers and application servers. They have round-the-clock staffing, which we do not have here, and they provide patching and keep the servers operational. They manage our network down to the core switch here at the FEC, and we have biweekly technical meetings to go over any issues.

In Herndon, there is a separate set of servers that acts as our back-end database. These take information from the various House and Senate committees that report on campaign finance. The public doesn't see this data as it appears here; this is the "raw" information that our analysts take and look into. We have a T1 line to the Senate so they can file their reports securely and quickly.

After the data has been cleared by our analysts -- and we have a 48-hour turnaround time -- we post it on the public Web site.

Do you consider your hosted services to be cloud computing? No, because we have specific servers that run our site, and we own those servers. Savvis just manages them for us. It's cloud computing only if I can connect and use a service with no regard to where that service may be emanating from. Savvis has talked to us about cloud computing, and that is very interesting to me. I can see it from a disaster recovery perspective. If I can contractually request services, and I get those services as specified in the contract in a secure manner, then that's fabulous.