Leveraging Cloud Computing, Virtualisation and Solar Technologies

to Increase Performance and Reduce Cost in Small to Medium-sized

Businesses

Emmanuel Kayode Akinshola Ogunshile

Department of Computer Science, University of the West of England, Bristol, U.K.

Keywords: Cloud Services, Solar Energy, Energy Storage, Digital Systems, Performance, Virtualisation.

Abstract: Cloud computing has been available for some time and is used in large organisations across the globe. We

know that cloud computing is an economically viable concept in these large global organisations, however

we do not understand sufficiently whether it can reduce costs in smaller organisations, given the

traditionally large investment costs. This paper performs an investigation into cloud computing concepts to

understand if it is a cost-effective solution to a medium-sized business. It draws on a business case which

outlines the problems and requirements for an organisation, covers the technologies that are available and

then evaluates which, if any, are the most economically viable. Alongside cloud computing it also analyses

virtualisation technologies for system consolidation, and also solar energy solutions to reduce energy

consumption costs. It then concludes which solutions meet the business requirements.

1 INTRODUCTION

In this paper we will be discussing how cloud

computing solutions can benefit small to medium-

sized companies. It will follow a business case

describing a company whose computing

environment is no longer sufficient to their

increasingly demanding IT requirements. It covers

how various cloud technologies can help combat

problems, provide new solutions and reduce cost.

To accompany this, we will investigate cloud

computing in general. This will help us understand

what is truly meant by the term, the types of cloud

topologies that are available, and the benefits and

drawbacks of this technology. Also, we will look

into cloud infrastructure and cloud services.

This paper also covers the topic of virtualisation.

Virtualisation and cloud computing work hand-in-

hand; cloud computing capability would not be

possible without the use of virtualisation. We will

look at what virtualisation is, the different methods

of virtualisation, and its benefits and drawbacks to

understand its value in businesses today.

We will also analyse solar technologies to

understand how solar power can be used to reduce

energy costs in an organisation. This includes an

investigation into whether solar power is an

appropriate and economically viable solution to our

business case.

Section 2 describes the business case, gives a

background of the business and outlines the

problems with its current IT infrastructure. In

section 3 we analyse the energy consumption of the

IT equipment within the business to help identify

which solutions will help reduce power

consumption.

In section 4 we consider virtualisation. In section

5 we perform an investigation into solar

technologies and apply our findings to the business

case. In section 5 we analyse specific technologies to

find out which would be the most effective solution

to meet the business requirements. Finally, in section

7 we conclude and summarise our findings.

2 BUSINESS CASE

This section gives a background to the business

we’re investigating, identifies its stakeholders and

the problems with its current IT infrastructure. It

also highlights the current IT configuration.

310

Ogunshile, E.

Leveraging Cloud Computing, Virtualisation and Solar Technologies to Increase Performance and Reduce Cost in Small to Medium-sized Businesses.

DOI: 10.5220/0006641103100321

In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2018), pages 310-321

ISBN: 978-989-758-295-0

2.1 Business Background

EMMA (East-Midlands Music Academy) is a

performing arts school located in the UK that

teaches degree-level subjects to its 3,000 students.

Started in 2011, the company has seen a steady

growth over the past 5 years and is now looking to

expand their IT environment to support this, as well

as future expansion.

The business currently employs 304 staff, which

are made up of the following:

 Administration: 114 (38%)

 Teaching: 141 (47%)

 Senior management: 6 (2%)

 Technical: 25 (7%)

 Manual: 18 (6%)

The business is expanding rapidly taking on

approximately 500 extra students each year and their

IT system is no longer sufficient. There are three

main areas that the academy wishes to address:

 Insufficient Storage: The academy is

running out of storage space for its students

and staff.

 Too Much Power: The academy would

like to reduce the expenditure of running

their IT equipment.

 Under-utilisation: Many of the servers are

not fully utilised by the applications

installed on them.

The key stakeholders to this project are as

follows:

Table 1: Project Stakeholders.

Position Name

CEO Emma Bradle

CFO Sharon Smith

VP Graham Hear

CIO Ben

amin Foresi

At present the academy has a centralised server

room containing all the servers that run common

services throughout the academy. These include:

directory and authentication services (Active

Directory), network services (Proxy, DHCP, DNS),

file and backup shares, print services, deployment

services, email, web and database services. The

current infrastructure consists of the following:

Table 2: Current Infrastructure in EMMA.

Server

Name

Model Services RAM

(GB)

HDD

(GB)

ACD-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Active

Directory,

DHCP,

DNS

2 300

ACD-002 HP

RX2800-i2

Active

Directory,

DHCP,

DNS

2 300

ACD-003 HP

RX2800-i2

Active

Directory

Backup

2 300

PRX-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Proxy

Master

2 300

PRX-002 HP

RX2800-i2

Proxy

Slave

2 300

FLE-001 HP

RX2800-i2

File 4 2,000

BCK-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Backup 2 2,000

PNT-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Print 2 300

DPL-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Operating

System

Deployme

2 600

EXC-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Exchange

Master

8 300

EXC-002 HP

RX2800-i2

Exchange

Slave

8 300

EXC-003 HP

RX2800-i2

Exchange

Backup

8 300

WEB-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Web

hosting

4 300

WEB-002 HP

RX2800-i2

Web

hosting

4 300

WEB-003 HP

RX2800-i2

Web

hosting

4 300

WEB-004 HP

RX2800-i2

Web hosing 4

DTB-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Database 8 300

DTB-002 HP

RX2800-i2

Database 8 300

APP-001 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-002 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-003 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

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Table 2: Current Infrastructure in EMMA (Cont.).

Server

Name

Model Services RAM

(GB)

HDD

(GB)

APP-004 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-005 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-006 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-007 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-008 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-009 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

APP-010 HP

RX2800-i2

Application 4 300

Total 116 12,100

The academy hosts 28 individual servers, all of

which are the same model, the only difference being

the RAM and HDD capacities.

At present, the academy’s servers combined

offer a total storage capacity of 12.1TB. These

servers run as individual units and the file server has

a total capacity of 2TB. This gives students a

maximum storage quota of 500MB and 1GB for

staff. This is no longer sufficient and the academy

would like to offer students a quota of 1GB and 2GB

for staff. Also, email users have a maximum

mailbox size of 50MB, they would like to increase

this to 200MB.

Based on the current numbers of students and

staff this requires 3.26TB of storage capacity. They

would also like the system to be able to

accommodate the next five years of expansion. The

academy expects to enrol 500 extra students each

year, totalling 5,500 students after five years.

Therefore, the system needs a useable storage

capacity of 7.26TB, with an additional 7.26TB for

backups, in total 14.52TB.

2.2 Summary

EMMA’s outlined their requirements of the system

as follows:

 Storage capacity of 14.52TB or more.

 Reduce energy consumption

 Utilise system resources effectively.

Because of this, only solutions that meet those

criteria will be suggested. EMMA has not specified

a budget as this is just an investigative project for

now. They would like to understand the potential

benefits of a new IT solution vs the cost, before they

allocate any funding.

3 ENERGY CONSUMPTION

To understand how much energy can be saved

through various technologies, it is first important to

understand the current energy consumption, along

with the cost. This will then allow us to evaluate

solutions and provide realistic expectations of any

reductions that can be made.

EMMA’s preferred IT provider is HP and

therefore all servers they own are HP branded. To

calculate the current energy consumption, we used

the HP Power Advisor tool located at:

https://paonline56.itcs.hpe.com/. The tool shows two

results: the first for when the system is at idle usage,

and the second at max load. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: HP Power Advisor Results of Current

Infrastructure.

As you can see, the power usage when at idle is

6,895.96 watts and at max load is 9,867.16 watts.

The system will rarely stay at either idle or max

load, so for the purposes of this paper we will

average out the results. The mean average of the two

is 8,381.56 watts.

The average kilowatt per hour cost in the UK, at

time of writing, is 12.12 pence (UKPower.co.uk

Limited, 2017). Therefore, for every hour EMMA

operates their IT infrastructure, it is costing them

101.58 pence, or £1.01. EMMA’s IT equipment is

drawing power 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

This equals £24.24 per day, £737.30 per month and

£8,847.60 per year. This was calculated using the

following:

Watts / 1000 = kilowatts

Kilowatts x Cost per kilowatt hour = Cost per kilowatt

hour (pence)

Cost per kilowatt hour / 100 = Cost per kilowatt hour (£)

Cost per kilowatt hour * 24 = Cost per day

Cost per day x 365 = Cost per year

Cost per year / 12 = Cost per month

Cost per year / 52 = Cost per week

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4 VIRTUALISATION

In this section we will look into virtualisation

technologies. Cloud computing would not be

possible, or at least would be much more difficult

without employing virtualisation. We will cover

what virtualisation is, the types of virtualisation

available and also the benefits and drawbacks of the

technology.

4.1 Benefits

Virtualisation can offer several benefits including:

 Lower Infrastructure Costs: By utilising

more resource per server, less servers

are needed, therefore reducing

implementation and running costs.

 Simplified Management: Hypervisors

offer centralised management of guest

operating systems.

 Business Continuity: Virtualisation

reduces reliance on physical servers,hk

and virtual machines can be replicated

and easily migrated to different physical

hosts. This redundancy allows for users

to continue working undisrupted if a

problem occurs.

 Energy Reduction: As less physical

servers are used, less energy is

expended.

 Flexibility: Resources allocated to

applications can be flexible. If an

application outgrows the specification

of its environment, administrators can

simply allocate more resource.

4.2 Drawbacks

 High Risk with Small-scale Systems: If

virtualisation is used in small-scale systems, the

impact of a physical problem with a server is

magnified. For example, if you consolidate your five

physical servers into one, any physical fault on that

server will bring down all services hosted from all

virtual machines.

 Performance: Virtual machines cannot

give the same performance in

comparison to running a machine

directly on the underlying hardware.

There is an extra layer added to

computing processes, the hypervisor.

 Complicated: Implementing a virtualised

environment is far more complicated

than setting up a traditional one. It

requires someone with knowledge of

virtualisation to install, configure and

maintain.

 Unsupported: Some applications will

simply not work on virtualised

machines. So, compatibility issues may

arise if not investigated properly.

4.3 Virtualisation Software Vendors

There are multiple vendors that produce hypervisor

software. For the purposes of this paper we will

discuss two; VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V.

4.3.1 VMWare Vs. Hyper-V

Both VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V are very

similar, and both offer feature rich virtualisation

software. However, there are some differences.

One advantage to a hypervisor is being able to

dynamically allocate RAM to machines, as and

when they need it. Both offer this, but Hyper-V can

only adjust RAM on guests running the Windows

operating system. In terms of scalability, Hyper-V

hosts can support up to 320 logical processors,

whereas VMWare can support just 160. Hyper-V

servers can utilise up to 4TB of RAM, whereas can

utilise VMW just 2TB. Also, a Hyper-V cluster can

include up to 63 nodes and support up to 8,000

virtual machines. VMWare can include just 32

nodes and supports a maximum of 3,000 virtual

machines.

Another advantage of Hyper-V is its licensing.

Hyper-V comes as standard with the Windows

Server 2012 operating system. If you purchase a

Datacentre Edition, each virtual machine that you

run on the host can run Windows 2012 without

needing an additional licence. Given that Windows

Server licenses are very pricey, roughly £500 per

licence, this can be a major cost saving (Posey,

2013).

5 SOLAR TECHNOLOGIES

In this section, we perform the necessary

calculations required to prove whether the

installation of solar panels at EMMA would be a

feasible solution to reduce their energy costs. We

compare two different types of solar panel, a low

Leveraging Cloud Computing, Virtualisation and Solar Technologies to Increase Performance and Reduce Cost in Small to Medium-sized

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313

cost and premium one, and calculate the total power

output from each. This calculation requires the

understanding of the amount of sunlight that will

penetrate the solar panels at EMMA’s specific

geographic location. The academy is keen to reduce

their energy bill and this section will evaluate which,

if any, solution would be economically viable.

We first need to work out how much power can

be generated from the academy. To understand this,

we need to know the roof space available for the

installation of solar panels, as well as the elevation

roof angle. These are:

 Roof space: 40m²

 Roof elevation: 40 degrees

The academy is connected to the national

electricity grid, and have said that they do not wish

to invest in solar batteries to store power generated

from the panels. Any excess energy produced will be

fed back into the national grid.

Solar panels have different efficiency ratings; the

power output of the solar panels is reflective of this.

For the purposes of this paper we will be comparing

two models of solar panel: a low cost one – the

Amerisolar AS-6P30-260W, and a premium one –

the Panasonic VBHN240SA06. To calculate the

output from these we need to know the price per

square metre and the efficiency rating. These are as

follows:

Table 3: Solar Panel Information.

Amerisolar

AS-6P30-

260W

Panasonic

VBHN240SA06

Price per m² £49.31 £385.00

Efficiency

ratin

0.16 0.22

The amount of power output from a solar panel,

at any given time, is in direct correlation to the

amount of sunlight hitting the panel and the angel of

that sunlight. A solar panel will generate maximum

power when the rays of the sun are perpendicular to

the surface of said panel.

The amount of sunlight available and the angle

are dependent on the geographic location of the solar

panels. So to calculate this, we must first gather

historical data of solar elevation for the latitude and

longitude of EMMA – 52.829290, -1.331927. This

can be shown in Figure 2 which plots solar elevation

throughout the months between the Summer and

Winter solstices of 2016.

Figure 2: Elevation of the sun above the horizon. Chart

generated from http://solardat.uoregon.edu/

SunChartProgram.html.

To understand a realistic power output for the

solar panels, we must work out the power output for

the days mentioned above, which we can then apply

an average to. This can be achieved using the

following formulae:

Symbols are used in this which are explained

below:

Table 4: Symbols used in equation for calculating solar

output.

Description

Symbol Value Units

Power of sunlight

on 1m² the

Earth’s surface

PSUN 1000 W/m²

Elevation of the

sun above the

horizon when

facing due south

ESUN Taken

from solar

elevation

chart

Degrees

Elevation of roof

angle

EROOF 40 Degrees

Solar panel

efficiency

C 0.16 or

0.22

No units

Roof area A 40 m²

Cost for solar

panel per square

metre

M 49.31 or

385.00

£ / m²

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Table 5: Equation(s) for calculating solar power output.

Description Equation Units

Elevation

angle of sun

on solar panel

ESUNROOF = ESUN +

ROOF

Degrees

Total power

generated by

solar panel

PPANEL = C x PSUN x

A x sin(E

SUNROOF)

Total

installation

cost for solar

anels

TOTAL = A x M £

Cost of solar

power

enerate

F = M

TOTAL / PPANEL £ / W

As the solar elevation values change every hour,

we must perform these calculations for each hour of

sunlight every day. For example, in the month of

December the values will be the following: (The

value of F is dependent on the solar solution chosen,

in this example we will base it on the Amerisolar

system).

Table 6: Power output from solar system in December

2015.

Time ESUN ESUNR

OOF

PPANEL F

08:00 0

(Below

horizon)

09:00 5 50 4902.684 £0.40

10:00 10 55 5242.573 £0.38

11:00 13 58 5427.508 £0.36

12:00 14 59 5485.871 £0.36

13:00 14 58 5427.508 £0.36

14:00 10 55 5242.573 £0.38

15:00 5 50 4902.684 £0.40

16:00 0

(Below

horizon)

Average 5233.057

For the month of June, the values will be the

following:

Table 7: Power output from solar system in June 2016.

Time ESUN ESUNROOF PPANEL F

03:00 0

(Below

horizon)

04:00 2 47 4680.664 £0.42

05:00 10 55 5242.573 £0.38

06:00 18 63 5702.442 £0.35

07:00 27 72 6086.762 £0.32

08:00 36 81 6321.205 £0.31

09:00 45 90 6400.000 £0.31

10:00 53 98 6337.716 £0.31

11:00 58 103 6235.968 £0.32

12:00 62 107 6120.35 £0.32

13:00 58 103 6235.968 £0.32

14:00 53 98 6337.716 £0.31

15:00 45 90 6400.000 £0.31

16:00 36 81 6321.205 £0.31

17:00 27 72 6086.762 £0.32

18:00 18 63 5702.442 £0.35

19:00 10 55 5242.573 £0.38

20:00 2 47 4680.664 £0.42

21:00 0

(Below

horizon)

Avera

e 5233.057

By doing this for every hour of every day in the

months specified, and applying a mean average, the

results for each solar technology were as follows:

AmeriSolar AS-6P30-260W

 Average output power from solar

panels: 5,960.057 Watts

 Average daylight hours per day: 12

hours

 Average cost of solar power generated:

£0.33

 Average output power from solar panels

per year: 26,033,528.976 Watts

Panasonic VBHN240SA06

 Average output power from solar

panels: 8,195.078 Watts

 Average daylight hours per day: 12

hours

 Average cost of solar power generated:

£1.88

 Average output power from solar panels

per year: 35,796,100.704 Watts

EMMA’s current IT infrastructure consumes

8,381.56 watts per hour which yearly equates to

73,221,308.16 watts. Therefore, the Amerisolar

system is capable of providing 35% of the power

required by the academy, whilst the Panasonic

system can provide 48%. The Amerisolar system

can generate 5.9 kilowatts of power on average, for a

price of £0.33. Buying the equivalent amount of

energy from the national grid would cost £0.72. The

Panasonic system can generate 8.2 kilowatts of

power on average, for a price of £1.88. Buying the

equivalent amount of energy from the national grid

Leveraging Cloud Computing, Virtualisation and Solar Technologies to Increase Performance and Reduce Cost in Small to Medium-sized

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would cost £0.98. EMMA wants to reduce their

energy expenditure, which therefore rules out the

Panasonic system, meaning the Amerisolar system

would be the best suited solution. It fits the business

requirements and will cover 35% of their annual

electricity bill for the datacentre. This will save them

on average £3,075.30 per year.

6 SOLUTION

This section of the paper analyses various solutions

we could use to combat the problems described by

EMMA. We investigate different server

technologies, and compare that with the cost of

implementation, to understand the economics of

each solution. This will allow us to conclude which

solution, if any, is viable.

6.1 Virtualisation

EMMA currently runs 28 servers to support their

network. These are individual units and the

applications run directly on the physical machine.

Many of the applications installed on these servers

are (1) not utilising the resources available to them,

and (2) not in use all the time. For example, one of

the application servers hosts a student attendance

application that runs once in the morning, and once

in the evening; the rest of the time the system is idle.

This is not an efficient use of resources and

virtualisation could help combat this problem.

Through employing virtualisation, the university

could consolidate the individual servers into just a

handful of physical units, therefore reducing power

consumption and running costs. In all solutions

offered next, a prerequisite is that virtualisation is

used.

I’ve identified three possible solutions for

EMMA – a blade server implementation, a new rack

server implementation and lastly, re-using and re-

configuring the existing infrastructure.

6.2 Solution 1 – Blade Server

The first solution is to use Blade servers. They offer

a high-performance system and minimise footprint

in the datacentre. They also allow for easy

expansion. Blade servers fit into a blade enclosure

which can host 8 individual servers, yet only takes

up 6 units in a rack. With EMMA’s current

infrastructure, 6 units in their rack accommodates

just three of their servers.

The blade model we will look at here is the HP

ProLiant BL460c Gen9 server. This server allows

for two high performance Intel Xeon processors to

be installed and accommodates up to 2TB of RAM.

The cost of the BL460c, with 128GB of RAM

installed, is £5,990.58. This would meet the

computing power needed for EMMA’s entire

network.

With regards to storage, blade servers do not

offer large interior storage capabilities. This model

only has two hard drive bays which would not

provide sufficient storage for EMMA. Blade servers

would usually interact with an external storage

solution such as a NAS device or a SAN. Due to

this, we will evaluate two exterior storage options

that would work with our blade setup, the HP

MSA2040 and the HP P4500.

6.2.1 HP Msa2040

The HP MSA2040 is a storage solution offered by

HP. It is a dedicated storage system that can be

accessed from servers using fibre channel, Ethernet

or SCSI. Depending on the technology used, data

transfer speeds to and from the device range from

1Gbps to 4Gbps.

The MSA2040 allows for 12 hard drives to be

installed giving a total capacity of 120TB. The

system’s modular design also allows expansion

through adding drive enclosures. Each enclosure can

host a further 12 drives, and a total of 7 extra drive

enclosures can be added. This system can support up

to 800TB of storage space.

It is a redundant solution and offers hot

swappable components, meaning that hard drives,

power supplies and fans etc, can be removed and

added to the device with no need of turning the

system off. It also allows RAID arrays to be

configured, meaning data can be mirrored and/or

striped across multiple disks. Therefore, if one hard

drive were to fail, the system would ensue no data

loss.

Prices for the MSA2040 start at £3950.00, but

that excludes any hard drives. Without adding

further drive bays, EMMA would need 12x 2TB

hard drives. This would cost a further £840.00 with

each hard drive costing roughly £70.00. So, all-in-all

the system would cost in the region of £4,790.00.

6.2.2 HP P4000

The HP P4000 is a fully-featured, IP-based Storage

Area Network solution. Traditionally, Storage Area

Networks are built with the intention of using Fibre

optics to connect servers to the device. However,

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this solution works on existing Ethernet

infrastructure. This therefore eliminates the high

costs of installing expensive Fibre channel and

reduces the complexity of setting up the solution.

It is designed as a high-availability device

offering redundant hot-swappable power supplies

and hard drives, dual network connectivity and

robust power and cooling diagnostics. With its

modular design, additional hardware can be added

when needed. It also offers intelligent software

which allows for the virtualisation of storage

systems into pools (i.e. multiple hard drives are seen

as one) and automated failover.

The storage capacity of the system ranges from

4.8TB, on basic models, to 21.6TB and more with

modular expansion.

The P4000 costs £4,680.00 but again that

excludes hard drives, 12x 2TB hard drives would

also be required totalling £840.00. This system

would cost in the region of £5,520.00.

6.2.3 Blade Summary

Alongside storage, blade servers need to be installed

in an enclosure, which creates an extra cost. The HP

C3000 enclosure would be required to support the

BL460c blade server, which costs £2829.15.

In total, the cost for a blade system, along with

its supporting storage solution, would be in the

region of £14,000.00. Also, as shown in Figure 3,

according to HP’s ProLiant’s Business Value

Calculator, the total cost of ownership of the blade

server over the next five years, (excluding the

storage solution), is £46,000.

Looking at the energy savings from

consolidating the infrastructure to a blade system, as

shown in Figure 4, the energy consumption for this

single blade and its enclosure is 624.11 watts at idle

and 1,865.68 watts at max power. Comparing this to

the 8,381.56 watts consumed currently, this would

cost the academy £1,961.20 to run annually, saving

them £6,886.40. (This does not include energy

consumption from the storage solution).

With Blade servers offering such large

computing performance, the academy would need

only one blade server to meet their requirements for

at least the next five years. If they require more

afterwards, buying another blade server would

increase their computing power to a level that is

unnecessary. Blade servers are only cost-efficient

when multiples are used, so providing the enclosure

and a SAN to provide storage for just one blade

server is rather excessive, and would not be an

appropriate solution for EMMA.

Figure 3: Total Cost of Ownership, HP Blade Solution.

Figure 4: Energy Consumption, HP Blade Solution.

6.3 Solution 2 – New Rack Server

The second solution is to purchase new, higher

performance and more efficient rack servers. With

the progression in technology over the past few

years, technically EMMA could consolidate all their

servers onto one more powerful server running

virtualisation. The model we are looking at here is

the HP ProLiant DL180 Gen 9. This model of server

allows for two high performance Intel Xeon

processors, a total of 512GB of RAM to be installed,

and up to 8 hard drives, meaning a total potential

capacity of 120TB. These specifications more than

meet the needs of the academy.

Moving to a one server setup, the running costs

of the single server, compared to the current 28, are

dramatically less. As Figure 6 shows, the energy

consumption of this setup would be 127.73 watts at

idle, and 383.74 watts at max power. Over a year the

energy cost of this server would be £403.39 which

would save the academy £8,444.21 per year.

The Total Cost of Ownership over 5 years of this

server (Figure 5) would be roughly £41,000. The

energy savings from implementing this server over 5

years would be £42,221.05. This means the

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academy’s cost vs savings from buying this server

would pretty much break even.

Also, having your entire IT solution housed on

one server does come with some associated risks

with regards to redundancy. For example, if there

was a failure on that server, your entire network

could potentially grind to a halt. This is not good

risk management; although the server has

redundancies built in, such as multiple hard drives

and dual power supplies etc, if that server lost power

for any reason, your entire infrastructure would

suffer.

Figure 5: Total Cost of Ownership, HP Rack Solution.

Figure 6: Energy Consumption, HP Rack Solution.

6.4 Solution 3 – Reconfiguring Existing

Hardware

The final solution is to reconfigure the existing

hardware in a more efficient way. As we discussed

before, the existing system does not use any form of

virtualisation. The servers already installed are

capable of running virtual machines, and across all

the servers the computing capability is there. All the

machines are the same model, meaning parts are

interchangeable, so rather than buying an entire new

solution we can swap parts around and reconfigure

the servers. Based on the services and applications

that EMMA needs to host, we would suggest the

following machine setup:

Table 8: Machine Setup, Reconfiguring Existing

Infrastructure.

Server

Name

Virtual

Machines

Services RAM HDD

SVR001 ACD001 Active

Directory,

DHCP,

DNS

2GB 60GB

ACD002 Active

Directory,

DHCP,

DNS

2GB 60GB

PRX001 Proxy 2GB 60GB

PNT001 Print 2GB 60GB

DPL001 Operating

System

Deployment

2GB 500GB

EXC001 Exchange 8GB 1.2TB

Total 18GB 2TB

SVR002 ACD003 Active

Directory

Backup

2GB 60GB

PRX002 Proxy Slave 2GB 60GB

EXC002 Exchange

Slave

8GB 1.2TB

Total 12GB 1.4TB

SVR003 FLE001 File 4GB 7TB

SVR004 BCK001 Backup 4GB 7TB

SVR005 WEB001 Web 4GB 100GB

WEB002 Web 4GB 100GB

WEB003 Web 4GB 100GB

WEB004 Web 4GB 100GB

Total 16GB 400GB

SVR006 DTB001 Database 8GB 500GB

DTB002 Database 8GB 500GB

Total 16GB 1TB

SVR007 APP001 Application 4GB 200GB

APP002 Application 4GB 200GB

APP003 Application 4GB 200GB

APP004 Application 4GB 200GB

APP005 Application 4GB 200GB

APP006 Application 4GB 200GB

APP007 Application 4GB 200GB

APP008 Application 4GB 200GB

APP009 Application 4GB 200GB

APP010 Application 4GB 200GB

Total 40GB 2TB

Total System 110GB 20.8TB

By doing this the academy’s energy consumption

would reduce to 1,948.47 watts at idle and 2,796.16

watts at max power (Figure 7). This is a reduction of

5-6,000 Watts. Looking at the max power figure,

this would amount to an annual cost of £2,939.32

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318

compared to the current £8847.60, equalling savings

of £5,908.28 yearly. This solution would also

support the academies next 5 years of growth.

Figure 7: Energy Consumption, Reconfiguring Existing

System.

6.5 Outsourcing Services

As we discussed previously, there are many third-

party companies offering cloud services you can buy

to remove the need of certain services in your

network. There are many different types of services

available for purchase, and for the purposes of this

paper we will refer back to the services we touched

on earlier – the Office 365 service from Microsoft

and the S3 service from Amazon. We will look at

the costs of each to identify whether either would

reduce costs to the EMMA datacentre.

6.5.1 Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud service that enables

IT Administrators to offload their Email, SharePoint,

video conferencing and file storage services to

Microsoft. By doing so, Administrators do not need

to host the services internally, allowing them to save

costs on the implementation of infrastructure and

software. Office 365 offers three different packages:

Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business

and Office 365 Business Premium. The features of

each package are outlined below.

6.5.2 Office 365 Business Essentials

 Price: £3.80 per user per month

 Email: Hosts email with each user having

50GB mailbox.

 Storage: 1TB file storage for all users

 Office Online: Users can access office

applications e.g. Word, Excel online.

 HD Video Conferencing: Users can

communicate with other users through

video conferencing.

6.5.3 Office 365 Business

 Price: £7.90 per user per month

 Email: Not included

 Storage: 1TB file storage for all users

 Office Applications: Users can install

office applications e.g. Word, Excel on

their devices.

6.5.4 Office 365 Business Premium

 Price: £9.40 per user per month

 Email: Hosts email with each user having

50GB mailbox

 Storage: 1TB file storage for all users

 HD Video Conferencing

 Office Applications: Users can install

office applications on their devices.

EMMA requires email access which rules out

Office 365 Business package. It does not need users

to be able to install office applications on their own

devices, so Office 365 Business Premium is not

necessary. Looking at the Office 365 Business

Essentials package, it costs £3.80 per user per

month. Over the next five years the academy needs

to support 5,500 student email accounts and 304

staff email accounts, totalling 5,804 accounts. To

buy this service from Microsoft the academy would

pay £22,055.20 per month and £264,662.40 per year.

In this case the service would not be economically

viable.

6.5.5 Amazon S3

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online

storage solution that is accessible through a web

interface. Users can store as much data as they wish

and the consumer only pays for the storage that they

use. Amazon offer three bands of pricing. For your

first 50TB of data stored, per month you will pay

$0.024 per GB. For the next 450TB of data stored,

per month you will pay $0.023 per GB. Finally, for

anything over 500TB, you will pay $0.022 per GB

per month. EMMA could potentially use this service

to back up their file, email and database servers.

Over the next 5 years they will require a backup

repository size of roughly 7TB. To use the service

from Amazon, this would cost the academy in the

region of £10,080 for that entire period.

It is also important to note that this calculation

has been based on the academy using 7TB of storage

immediately, whereas in reality this may or may not

be reached over the 5-year period.

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7 CONCLUSIONS

To conclude, we will firstly glance back at section 2

where we defined the requirements for this project.

They were:

 Increase storage space

 Reduce power usage

 Utilise servers more effectively

Looking at all the solutions outlined above, the

most cost-efficient solution is to reconfigure the

existing IT infrastructure and employ virtualisation

to consolidate the 28 servers onto just 7 physical

servers. By doing so, this will increase storage space

to cover the current and future needs of the business.

It will also reduce power consumption by 67% and

utilise the servers more effectively, thus meeting the

requirements as outlined by the organisation.

If we pair this with the installation of the solar

technology chosen in section 6, with a total power

output from the solar panels being 5,960.057 watts,

and the power requirements for the new system

being just 2,796.16 watts, the solar installation will

cover the entire power needs of the IT equipment.

The academy could then use the remaining power

elsewhere in the academy for further savings, or sell

it back to the national grid.

Given the savings made from implementing such

a system, using external cloud services for email or

data backups etc, would not be necessary, and in this

instance would not result in any savings. The only

potential benefit of using a cloud service would be

for data redundancy. For example, if you backed up

files to the Amazon S3 service, due to them being

geographically separate from the primary data store,

there is less risk of permanent data loss. But with

data redundancy not being top priority for the

academy at this time, using such a service is not

necessary.

In this paper, we feel all the requirements

EMMA specified have been sufficiently met and that

the outcome is more favourable than we had initially

thought it would be. Without performing any

research into the various topics covered in this

paper, we feel that traditionally the solution would

have been to rip out the old equipment and start a

fresh. However, by employing a different approach

we have managed to cut costs dramatically whilst

almost eradicating any investment needed.

This proves that ultimately it is not always about

buying into the latest technologies and having the

crème-de-la-crème. If we leverage what we’ve got

and focus on the customer needs more than our own,

we can come up with better solutions that reduce

wastage and costs, yet still provide a more than

capable solution. To answer the question posed at

the beginning of this paper; can cloud computing

save costs in small to medium-sized businesses, it is

our opinion that yes, in very small organisations

with just 10 or 20 employees, using cloud computing

services can indeed save the cost of installing your

own IT infrastructure. It also means that no IT

support staff are required etc. However, the larger an

organisation gets, the more it costs to use cloud

services, and as demonstrated in the business case

outlined in this paper, using the Microsoft Office

365 service would have cost the academy £22K per

month. We think the larger an organisation gets,

implementing your own private cloud can work out

in reduced savings, i.e. by consolidating computing

power onto less machines, having applications

delivered over the network rather than maintaining

them on all employee devices etc. However, buying

cloud services from third-party companies will need

to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

As a final note, it is important to consider the

fact that our business case had a large existing set of

IT infrastructure available to use. If this wasn’t the

case, using cloud services may have been more cost-

effective than buying new equipment. Also, the

prices quoted for the cloud services in this paper

were from the standard consumer boards. We are

sure that the third-party companies can negotiate a

better deal with larger organisations.

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