QVC 2014 IT Internship Program
This past summer I had the opportunity to intern at QVC in their IT Department. I worked on the Server Admin team where we maintained and built over 1,300 physical and virtual servers. Working at QVC was quite an amazing experience as I had the chance to see how IT supports and drives the world’s largest digital retailer. On the Server Admin team, I was immersed in what is, really, the backbone of computing and the foundation of information technology-without a strong server infrastructure, all business would come to a halt. Prior to stepping into IT at QVC, I had little knowledge of what a massive undertaking it is to run such a department for such a large company- several thousand employees between Studio and Founders’ Parks in West Chester, PA and thousands more at QVC affiliates in the UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, and, coming in 2015, France.
I was a part of several projects over the course of my 12 weeks working with the Server Admin team, the largest of which was our Converged Server project on which we were migrating a portion of our virtual infrastructure from HP hardware to UCS (CISCO) hardware. QVC employs roughly 1,200 virtual machines (VMs) through the leading provider for virtualization, VMware. With this large number of virtual machines in deployment, they, as well as other large companies, use software called VSphere to manage their virtual infrastructure. It was through VSphere I was managing and conducting the migrations of some 50 virtual machines across different hosts and datastores. Performing these migrations meant downtime for each virtual machine. This meant coordinating with the apps dev admin whose application ran on the particular VM. For instance, if an SQL database “sat” on the server I was migrating, I was responsible for coordinating downtime with the SQL DBA and smoke testing his or her applications with them post migration to ensure the move was successful.
Another exciting piece of technology I was able to learn at QVC was Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most of my team was responsible for Windows Servers, however, we were amassing a large number of Linux machines at a fast rate. I had had very minimal experience with the Linux OS prior to my internship, so it was extremely beneficial to be able to get involved with a new technology. Three of QVC’s distribution centers were getting COGNOS (business intelligence) software and we were responsible for building the virtual machines that were going to run COGNOS. I was a part of the build of 9 Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMs and their configuration (networking, software installation). With Windows this would have been interesting but not as interesting as it was through Linux. I learned a wealth of knowledge about Linux including user groups, permissions, file structures, and the commands to navigate the OS as Linux is operated strictly through command line (there is actually one GUI in Linux for all the hard-core Linux fans out there).
Overall, my experience at QVC was outstanding. I was able to meet some amazing people who have a real passion for what they do. The chance to see true “technical” IT work done on such a large scale was impressive. If, in the future, I ever have the chance to do any IT project management or IT Business Analysis work, interning at QVC has afforded me the opportunity to understand IT on a more appropriate level.