Regional Gardens Ltd is a company that runs a few related gardening enterprises. It has a large
display garden that it opens for public inspection several times a year. These enterprises include the
Regional Gardens Nursery which sells plants and garden supplies to the public, and Regional Garden
Planners which 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 has the following server infrastructure:
• 2 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2, (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB
RAM, 140GB HDD);
• 3 x SQL Server 2003 database servers on Windows Server 2003 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM,
250GB RAID-5 array);
• 1 x Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2 (2 x Xeon 3.6GHZ, 8GB RAM,
250GB RAID-1 array);
• 4 x Windows Server 2003 File and Print servers (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB RAM, 250GB RAID-1
array);
• 2 x Windows Server 2008 R2 running Microsoft SharePoint 2013 (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB
RAM, 250GB RAID-5 array);
• 2 x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB
RAM, 140GB HDD).
This infrastructure has not been updated for some time and the Regional Gardens Board is
concerned that a full upgrade may now cost them more than it is worth. The Board is now
considering moving some, or all, of their current infrastructure into the Cloud. The Board sees this as
a strategic move to future-proof the company and is looking to a move to the cloud to ensure that
its services are:
• Readily available and always accessible,
• Capable of handling heavy loads in times of peak demand,