Network & Server Infrastructure
in New Kensington, PA

New Kensington and the Alle-Kiski Valley sit at an interesting intersection of legacy manufacturing infrastructure and modern professional services, and the network design that supports either side has to fit both realities. A shop floor along the Allegheny River that's still running PLCs from a 1990s automation install, a Route 56 professional office that just hired its first remote employee in Tarentum, a healthcare practice with a Lower Burrell main location and a Vandergrift satellite, and a Route 366 manufacturer-services firm shuttling drawings between an engineering office and a fabrication shop, all need network and server infrastructure designed around their actual physical and operational footprint. MCR Business Tech Solutions has spent two decades building that infrastructure for Valley businesses, and the patterns that work here are not the patterns that work for a downtown Pittsburgh tech tenant.

The single biggest design decision in any New Kensington manufacturing environment is OT/IT segmentation. Production-floor equipment (PLCs, HMI consoles, label printers, barcode scanners, machine-integration servers) does not belong on the same Layer 2 broadcast domain as front-office desktops, guest Wi-Fi, or the building's IP cameras. Ransomware that gets onto an office PC via email shouldn't be one ARP hop away from the controllers running the press. We build segmented VLANs with a properly-rule-bound firewall between the floor and the office, deny-by-default east-west traffic, and a documented allow-list for the specific protocols (Modbus TCP, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA) that actually need to cross the boundary. Most Valley shops we audit on first engagement have this entirely flat. We fix it.

Brownfield buildings drive the second design constraint. New Kensington, Arnold, Tarentum, and Vandergrift have an enormous stock of repurposed industrial real estate where Cat3 phone cabling was strung in 1985 and nobody has touched the in-wall paths since. We assess what's actually in the wall (with a tone generator and a thermal camera, not by hopeful assumption), identify where new Cat6A or fiber pathways can be pulled without ripping out drywall, and design around the building's actual constraints. Where the building genuinely won't accept a wired pull, we use commercial Wi-Fi 6/6E with proper survey-driven AP placement, not consumer-grade gear hopefully stuck on a shelf.

Multi-site connectivity matters in the Valley because so many Valley businesses run on two or three locations connected by a long, narrow geography. New Kensington headquarters, Lower Burrell satellite, Tarentum service center, Apollo storage and dispatch. We build site-to-site VPN or SD-WAN tunnels between those locations with a single identity layer, a single file share, and consistent firewall and content-filtering policy. The user experience at the Vandergrift desk should feel exactly like the experience at the New Kensington desk. The compliance and audit picture should be one document, not four.