Metro's Response to Covid-19
Hello to all of our friends! We hope for your safety and good health during this crazy time and like you, we look forward to getting back to “normal”
We have been extremely busy over the past couple of weeks helping our clients remote their operations to be in compliance with state and city orders to quarantine. We have also taken many steps to keep our own operation going with an emphasis on everybody’s safety. The portability of our VOIP phone system and total remote access to our systems has enabled everybody to work from their home. We do rotate people in and out of the office on a regular basis so we generally have somebody available for pick up and delivery. We have reviewed the state, county and city quarantine orders and as an essential service, Metro has been able to perform most services with few exceptions.
How can we help your business during this time? Below are a few ways we may be of service:
-Rental Equipment-
Although we have seen a run on our rental gear over the past few weeks, we still have plenty of fresh high performance workstations, monitors and portable RAID arrays available for rent. Many people have computers at home already, but if they need true high performance systems with advanced GPU capabilities, there is no substitute for one of our HP Z8, Z840 and Z820 workstations.
-Software Licenses-
In some cases you are able to make permanent licenses available on a “loaner” basis, but if this is not possible you may want to consider a monthly license. Most software licenses we sell, and in particular Autodesk, are available on a monthly renewable subscription. These are perfect for usage on your home computers or one of our rental workstations.
-Infrastructure Services-
Some of our clients are taking advantage of the down time they are experiencing to make changes to their infrastructure. There is no better time to rewire your facility or make server upgrades than when everybody is off premises. Let us know if you would like to discuss future technology infrastructure requirements and how we can help you wire for the future. We are experts in high performance TCP networking including 10, 25, 40, 50, and 100G transports.
One more important thing! Many of you have machine rooms with centralized servers and infrastructure, but how well informed are you if there is a problem? With everybody working off premises, audible alarms for heat, drive failures, etc. will not be noticed. This weekend our support department received automated notifications from one of our storage servers that the temperature was above threshold (it was hot!). We contacted the client to let them know that they may have a problem. Sure enough, the client entered his office and realized that the air conditioning system had failed. Fortunately he was able to shut down the gear before any permanent damage was done. Although we try to set up notifications on all equipment we sell, these are not always reliable.
Some of you have dedicated protection systems for your machine rooms, but if you don’t we would highly suggest getting this great product from Amazon:
SensorPush Wireless Thermometer/Hygrometer for iPhone/Android
We have tested this and found it to be remarkably reliable. It is the best $150 insurance policy you can buy. Just remember to get both the sensor and the WIFI gateway. By the way, this unit also includes a hygrometer to monitor humidity levels as well. Don’t think you will ever need that? Ask us about the great Metro flood of 2019. I wish we had this installed ourselves!
Be well, take care, and let us know if we can help you in any way.
