Case Study

Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a number of related gardening enterprises. It has a large display garden that it opens for public inspection a number of times a year. The company also owns the Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public. The company also owns Regional Garden Planners, which is a small company that provides garden advice, design and consultancy services. Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data centre at its main site in Bathurst where the company's servers and data storage is located. The company runs some 40 Windows 2008 R2 physical servers in their data centre in file, print and application server roles. Each of these servers has 16GB of RAM with dual-core Xeon E5 CPU and 500GB HDD. There are 4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 servers which run the company websites. The company also has a small iSCSI SAN with 100TB of storage which is the main data storage location for the company. The company's users, who include management, administrative staff, nursery and Regional Garden Planners staff, use a range of different types of relatively modern personal computers running Windows 7 to connect to the company data centre. The directors of Regional Gardens Ltd have received a report from a group of consultants that recommends that the company should consider using Office 365 as an SaaS service for office productivity applications and email. They have also recommended that the company's bespoke garden design software could be run as a PaaS service for internal users, but could also be supplied as a platform for other garden designers to access as a service. They have also indicated that the company may want to consider moving some of its aging computing infrastructure to an IaaS service to avoid the capital cost of replacement.

1. Describe the steps that you would take to develop a business case for migrating the infrastructure and services to the cloud.

2. The Board has indicated that it might want to run their own Private cloud. Explain the steps that would be need to achieve this.

3. What are the critical points, other than cost, that an enterprise would need to consider in choosing to migrate from local hosted infrastructure to an IaaS service provider.

4. Describe the benefits and drawbacks, excluding costs, of moving to an IaaS model in a public cloud.

5. Discuss the requirements for remote administration, resource management, SLA management and billing management for an IaaS deployment to a Public cloud.