Server Operations Internship at Prudential
Starting in early June 2017, and lasting for 10 weeks, I held an internship at Prudential Financial in Dresher, Pennsylvania. I worked in the server operations group of Prudential’s internal IT organization. Working in the physical production environment of a large enterprise provided valuable experience and exposure to many different IT specializations. I also had the opportunity to travel to Prudential’s headquarters in Newark, NJ and a separate suburban campus where many of their other IT operations are conducted. Prudential employs a vast number of IT professionals in different fields who shared their experiences and career advice with me.
Some of my day-to-day duties included:
- Developing analytics tools to monitor the hardware and software in deployed servers
- Using management interfaces for server infrastructure that allow an administrator to control thousands of physical servers at a time
- Evaluating new management interfaces from various vendors
- Working in a datacenter to install and repair hardware
- Working with other business units in the company to address hardware needs such as new firmware updates
- Testing network configurations and links for various types of high-speed network connections
- Using internal enterprise change management systems to schedule maintenance windows that minimize the impact of updates and upgrades that require downtime
- Inventorying components to evaluate response readiness to hardware failures and preparing order lists to make the most efficient use of resources with the goal of improving uptime