Question

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.

Regional Gardens Ltd has a small data center 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.

2. One of Regional Gardens’s first undertakings is to provide all their staff with the ability to access office automation, such as email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities, as well as online storage for their files, whether they are in the office, at home, or deployed on a customer’s site in the field. The Regional Gardens board is very concerned to learn about the critical issues, other than cost, that may affect the supply of Cloud based office automation to their staff. You will need to prepare a report on the best way to provide office automation for Regional Gardens. Your report should:

a.Provide Regional Gardens with TWO different approaches to providing office automation to their staff;

b.Outline the major benefits and issues with each approach;

c.Provide a summary of your advice to this company along with your recommendation about which option to choose. Your report should be no longer than 2 pages. (20 marks)

3. Regional Gardens has a single data center in Bathurst which contains the following 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 Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux servers running Apache and TomCat (2 x Xeon 2.8GHZ, 16GB RAM, 140GB HDD).

a.Regional Gardens is considering initially moving its Web infrastructure to a public Cloud, but they are unsure of whether they should migrate to an IaaS or PaaS solution. You are to write a report for the Regional Gardens board that:

b.Describes the difference between infrastructure provided using an IaaS provider and a platform provided by a PaaS provider in a public Cloud. You will need to discuss the critical differences, issues and factors, other than cost, that Regional Gardens will have to consider in choosing to migrate their existing Web infrastructure to either an IaaS or a PaaS service provider. Your report should take no more than two pages. (30 marks)

Answer 1

Difference between IaaS provider and PaaS provider

1) IaaS is abbreviation of INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE and PaaS is a abbreviation of PLATFORM AS A SERVICE

2) IaaS is comprised of highly automated
and scalable compute resources, complemented by cloud storage and network capability which can be self-provisioned, metered, and available on-demand.IaaS providers offer these cloud servers and their associated resources
via dashboard and/or API. While PaaS providers abstract much of the work of dealing with servers and give clients an environment in which the operating system and server software, as well as the underlying server hardware and
network infrastructure are taken care of, leaving users free to focus on the business side of scalability, and the application development of their product or service.

3) Example of Iaas providers is Navisite, exoscale, and Softlayer. Examples of PaaS providers include Heroku, Google App Engine, and Red Hat OpenShift.

4) Critical differences are Users of IaaS can outsource and build a “virtual data center” in the cloud and have access to many of the same technologies and resource capabilities of a traditional data center without having to
invest in capacity planning or the physical maintenance and management of it. While PaaS is built on top of virtualization technology. Businesses can requisition resources as they need them, scaling as demand grows, rather
than investing in hardware with redundant resources.

IaaS is the most flexible cloud computing model and allows for automated deployment of servers, processing power, storage, and networking.IaaS clients have true control over their infrastructure than users of PaaS or SaaS services.

Flexibility
IaaS has flexibility to become whatever type of service necessary for a business, and the pricing models reflect the possibility for multiple approaches.
Paas, particularly with Amazon RDS, the models are more rigid in configuration and the variable costs.

Cost

In term of cost Iass is chipest service than paas.

So I suggest to Regional Gardens Ltd. use IaaS for migrate their existing Web infrastructure.