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. 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.

Enterprise Architecture

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
• 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 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.

Knowledge Question

Regional Gardens is also considering whether to use PaaS or SaaS to provide services to its employees. Regional Gardens has deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2010 from its data centre as a collaboration and document management tool for its 70 staff. The SharePoint 2010 instance has been extensively customised to suit Regional Gardens needs and also runs Project Central, their Project Management tool as a separate application from within SharePoint. All employees have the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of office automation products installed on their respective desktops or laptops. Regional Gardens would like to move its SharePoint 2010 instance to the cloud to make it more accessible, particularly to its users working at customer’s sites.