Developing a Power Efficient Private Cloud Ready Infrastructure for

Small-Medium Sized Enterprises

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.

Abstract: Digital technology is advancing and the means of powering it so. For small-medium enterprise (SME) to

remain competitive in today’s economic climate it is paramount they can respond to business challenges with

agility and efficiency. Despite knowing this, many of today’s SMEs retain legacy hardware and siloed

infrastructures that are both expensive to maintain and incapable of being agile. These heterogeneous

infrastructures offer no elasticity for its consumers and act as a barrier to its own innovation. Acquiring

requisite budget to transform such digital infrastructure with high operational energy costs has proven an

uphill struggle as there is a distinct lack of perceived benefits from undergoing such transformation program.

However, amidst the various comparable options, claims, and features from different technology vendors

available in the market there are true benefits applicable to all SMEs. To demonstrate how a solution such as

moving to the cloud and or adopting solar power could benefit a SME’s infrastructure, and operational costs,

the requirements of a fictitious Marketing Agency have been analysed by a company specialised in cloud,

virtualisation and solar power to introduce a framework suitable for any SME curious of the benefits presented

by basic cloud principles, virtualised resources and renewable energy.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing is a field of study hindered by

misunderstanding and confusion. This is due to the

term Cloud being used to describe many services that

aren’t clouds. Cloud computing is more than server

virtualization and, is best described by NIST in the

following quote, "Cloud computing is a model for

enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network

access to a shared pool of configurable computing

resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,

applications and services) that can be rapidly

provisioned and released with minimal management

effort or service provider interaction." (Brown, 2016)

To develop an understanding of cloud and its

potential benefits to a SME the Cloud Company,

“Infrastructure Revolutions Ltd”, will be analysing

the business challenges and requirements of a

fictitious SME with the view to combat and or address

these challenges using implementable Cloud

solutions and solar technology. Though this paper

pays homage to the fundamental benefits of moving

to the cloud such as “simplified management

lifecycles”, the main area of focus for this paper will

be on the everlasting benefits to an infrastructure’s

Power Consumption.

The example SME featured in this paper is a

Marketing Agency with expendable income that has

been allocated for internal growth. Its commonplace

for SMEs to invest in internal growth so deciding how

this income will be invested should outline a

repeatable framework for businesses of a similar

standing. Infrastructure Revolutions Ltd performing

the IT overhaul are experts in the virtualization, cloud

and solar market, meaning focus will go beyond

converging the SME’s Infrastructure.

To address the identified challenges and

requirements of the fictitious SME, the paper has

been organized as follows: Section one introduces the

paper, Section two researches and analyses the SME,

section three the fundamentals of cloud computing

deployments, section four the cost analysis of

implementing a private cloud solution, section five a

cost benefit analysis of supporting an IT

infrastructure via Solar power, section six the paper’s

proposed solution and section seven the conclusion.

Ogunshile, E.

Developing a Power Efﬁcient Private Cloud Ready Infrastructure for Small-Medium Sized Enterprises.

DOI: 10.5220/0006641002990309

In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2018), pages 299-309

ISBN: 978-989-758-295-0

299

2 BUSINESS CASE

Throughout this paper, the research will relate back to

the fictitious business case outlined in this section.

This is done to both provide direction for the research

and to enhance the understanding of the implications

of implementing cloud computing from a siloed

infrastructure.

2.1 Business Background

The SME that will be analyzed in this paper is “Good

Impressions Ltd” (GIL). GIL is a Marketing Agency

that currently employs 80 staff members with

expansion on the horizon. Established in 2007, GIL is

a business based in Buxton (Derbyshire) that has

experienced expediential growth over its 10 years of

business. This rapid growth has resulted in much of

the business’s equipment not being updated and only

being scaled for demand. The legacy systems

currently in operation at GIL are all owned and

managed in house. Though GIL’s IT department

would like to continue to manage their datacenter

locally there is little opposition within the board of

directors in moving their datacenter offsite as running

costs are becoming too high.

Presently, an investment of £25,000 has been

allocated to GIL’s IT department for the

infrastructure overhaul. James Shaw, the Chief

Financial Officer, has advised that the main objective

of this investment should be to negate the upsurge in

running costs but has also provided no detail on the

semantics of achieving this.

Despite the given issues that accompany a siloed

infrastructure being IT Sprawl (Defined as a situation

in which multiple, under-utilized resources take up

more space and consume more resources than can be

justified by their workload), high running costs, and

problematic scalability other departments have also

expressed problems they hope the planned

remediation will resolve.

Sales Executives have raised concerns of

accessibility when at a Customer Site. GIL’s current

infrastructure doesn’t allow for its employees to

access locally stored data from a PC not on the

network. The production departments also have

problems with the current file servers having

insufficient storage (Each requires 2TB).

Furthermore, the tower server currently being used

for video rendering is expensive to enhance,

inconsistently used, and has been sporadically

rebooting since July 2016 (6 Months).

2.2 Stakeholders

In the section below, there are two tables outlining

GIL’s Organizational structure and the stakeholder’s

key comments.

Table 1: GIL Organization Structure.

Department Title Name

- CEO Frank Smith

Finance CFO James Shaw

Sales VP Harry Truman

IT CIO Jessica Cox

Production DH Jon Marston

The second table in this section, outlines how the

problems discussed in Section 2.1 are aligned to the

internal stakeholders at GIL.

Table 2: Stakeholder’s Key Comments.

Name Comments

Frank Smith

“Create a greener infrastructure

to enhance the company’s

public image”

James Shaw

“A reduction in datacentre

operational costs”

Harry Truman

“More Support for a mobile

workforce and more storage”

Jessica Cox

“A simplification of datacentre

lifecycle management and agile

scalability”

Jon Marston

“Document Version Control

and easier file sharing”

2.3 Current Hardware

The last table below outlines all the hardware

(Personal Computers, Telephones etc. excluded) that

GIL owns and the problems currently related to them.

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Table 3: Current Hardware & Utilization.

Server Role Dept. Problem

DNS1 AD and

DNS

Server

IT N/a

PRNTSRV Print Server IT Slow

DHCP1 DHCP

Server

IT N/a

MailSrv Exchange

Server

IT N/a

FS1 File Server Finance N/a

FS2 File Server Sales Insufficient

Data Storag

(Currently

1TB)

FS3 File Server Prod Insufficient

Data Storag

(Currently

1TB)

ProdSrv1 Rendering

Tower

Prod No back-up /

Server

Failure

2.4 Summary of Requirements

After reviewing GIL the following observations were

made:

1. The new solution must cost no more than

£25,000 to buy and implement.

2. The new solution must reduce datacenter

power consumption.

3. The new solution must resolve the following

department issues:

a. The sales and production files ser-

vers have insufficient storage and

need to be doubled (2TB each).

b. The Production rendering Server is

expensive to maintain and is

rebooting sporadically.

c. The Sales Department would like

easier Offsite Access to file stored

on the network.

d. The Print server requires more

compute power.

4. The new solution must simplify IT

management and introduce agile scalability.

5. The new solution shall produce a return on

investment within 9 years.

6. The Datacenter should remain onsite in

Buxton.

Business Objective: “To produce a greener

infrastructure that is, easier to manage, consumes

less electricity, and costs less to operate.

To measure the fit criteria of the solution

proposed in this paper each solution will reference the

requirements and business objective listed above.

3 PUBLIC CLOUD PROVIDERS

Cloud Computing is a competitive market with most

large enterprises having a stake. Many familiar names

in computing such as Adobe, Microsoft, Google and

IBM now offer a cloud service. The 3 most successful

public cloud providers are Microsoft (Azure / Office

365), Amazon and IBM (Olanubi, 2016) as they

currently provide 50% of the world’s cloud

computing services (Olanubi, 2016).

Despite all vendors competing in the same field

there is little correlation between both the services

and and how they charge for them.

In cloud computing the two most popular models

are “pay-as-you-go” and “subscription” but each of

these models have spawned sub-models for more

specific needs. The IaaS or PaaS models implemented

by Azure, Amazon AWS and BlueMix tend to be pay-

as-you-go but SaaS like Office 365 and Adobe

Creative Cloud tend to be Subscription. So with

varied choice being a fallacy, there will be five

pertinent factors affecting cost with any given

solution (Al-Roomi et al., 2013):

1. Initial Costs – The amount of money that a

service provider spends to buy the resources*.

2. Lease Period – This is the period in which the

customer pays to have those resources

allocated to them.

3. QoS (Quality of Service) – This is the set of

technologies and models offered by the

service provider to enhance the user

experience i.e data privacy, availability,

support, and redundancies; IaaS, PaaS or SaaS

service models.

4. Age of Resources – Some vendors will offer

clusters of resources pooled from legacy

hardware for a cheaper price. However, as

indicated, this also means newer resources can

be pooled and leased at a more expensive price.

5. Bandwidth – Whether a resource is turned off

or on, in high demand or low different vendors

will commonly adjust their costs accordingly.

*Becoming less common. These costs are often

liquidated and covered by the cost of the lease

When selecting a cloud computing vendor three

aspects have to be weighed: Pricing, QoS and

Utilization. A customers requirements will subjectively

Developing a Power Efﬁcient Private Cloud Ready Infrastructure for Small-Medium Sized Enterprises

301

be used to decide what aspect yields the most benefits.

Figure 1 included below best displays the components

of each aspect and gives an idea to how a public or

hybrid cloud solution is priced.

Figure 1: The Aspects of Pricing Public Cloud.

Microsoft (Azure)

Microsoft Azure has elements of an IaaS and a PaaS

(Microsoft, 2017) as it provides Virtual Machines and

Windows products such as Windows Server 2012 on

demand. Alongside supporting IPv6, Azure also

allows a consumer to integrate Office 365,

Microsoft’s strictly SaaS hosting service for all office

suite applications. Both Office 365 and Azure can be

adopted separately or as a pair; adopting Office 365

however, is becoming one of the most popular cloud

services present in hybrid clouds.

Available in 140 different countries and boosting

a Standard Service Level Agreement of 99.95%

(Microsoft, 2017), a standard higher than an

independent SME’s, Azure is highly practical.

However, quantifying a cloud vendor such as Azure

is difficult as it includes many features that are

subjective thus unquantifiable i.e. license

management systems, flexible provisions, layer 7

Load balancing with built in HTTP.

As of 2016 Microsoft has discontinued their

subscription based service for Azure. However, the

price of the service can be measured by their “pay-as-

you-go” model. Using the Azure calculator

(Microsoft Pricing calculator, 2017) we know a basic

tier server with 1 core, ~2GB of RAM and 1TB

storage, can be provisioned with a SLA of 99.5% for

£34.12 a month; £1.14 a day or £409 a year. This

server would be an alternative to the Sales File server

currently in operation at GIL if an extra tb was added

and be easily expandable.

Amazon

“Amazon Web Services” (AWS) is both a SaaS and

an IaaS. A reliable cloud service that has been

entrusted with hosting Netflix’s Media Service.

Similar to Azure, AWS offers a pay-as-you-go service

that can be paid monthly or be paid upfront for a

reduced price. The payment model for AWS is more

complex than Azure as acquisition costs, number of

total users, and projected number of interactions a

second are all factored into pricing. However, using

the AWS calculator we know a server on a 3 year

lease with 1 core, 2GB of RAM and 1TB storage, can

be provisioned for £12.32 a month; £0.44 a day or

£147.84 a year. This server would be a cheaper

alternative to the Sales File server currently in

operation and would be easily expandable.

IBM

IBM is the third most popular cloud vendor and is the

only cloud vendor with a subscription model and the

only service to offer all three service models

(Olanubi, 2016). Their cloud Service “BlueMix”

simplifies Cloud management and makes desirable

solutions such as big data analytics easily integratable

through pre-built configurations. Much like AWS

IBM’s payment model is complex as predictable

usage can be billed as a subscription or the pay-as-

you-go service also factors in usage, bandwidth and

more. However, using the IBM calculator we know a

server on a 3 year lease with 1 core, 2GB of RAM and

1TB storage, can be provisioned for $98.45 (£78.60

with an exchange rate of 0.80) a month; $3.28 a day

(£2.63) or £943 a year. This server would be an

alternative to the Sales File server currently in

operation and be easily expandable but be much more

expensive, even without the extra storage.

Office 365

Office 365 is a SaaS, subscription based Microsoft

cloud venture. It encompasses all Microsoft office

applications

plus other productivity services such as

Skype for Business, Exchange Online and OneDrive.

For £9.40 a single employee can have access to the

aforementioned office applications and services. Office

365 would make an exchange server redundant in an

SME as 50GB is allocated to each user. With 1TB of

personal storage allocated to each user and a 1TB Team

site (incremented by 50GB per account) file servers

could also be retired. However, 80 office 365

subscriptions at £9.40 is £9,024 annually. A figure too

high for consideration.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Like Office 365, the Adobe Creative Cloud (ACC) is

strictly a SaaS. The purpose of this service is to supply

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the entire collection of Adobe products from photoshop

to Adobe XD. Joining the ACC prompts such benefits as

efficient content creation, version consistency, and cloud

storage. For an Enterprise, the ACC offers license

subscriptions for as little at £11.99 per person, per

month, per application or £38.99 per person, per month.

The business case could greatly benefit from a

subscription to this service as it would eliminate onsite

storage problems and improve collaboration efforts.

Table 4: Pros and Cons of Cloud Vendors.

Company Approach Pros Cons

Amazon

Pay-as-you-

Cheapest IaaS,

reliable

Small

Catalogue of

services

Microsoft

Pay-as-you-

Large Catalogue

of service and

integrates with

Office 365

seamlessly

Unfinished

IBM

Subscription

Pay-as-you-

Subscription

Model, offers

all 3 service

models, easy to

deploy solutions

Expensive

Office 365

Subscription Constantly

updated,

Collaborate

easily, reduces

strain on IT

departments,

work anywhere

Requires

internet, feature

set changes

forced,

underutilization

of functionality,

expensive in

bulk

Adobe

Creative

Cloud

Subscription Constantly

updated, low

initial costs,

remote access

Requires

internet,

Inconsistent

pricing history

All of the public cloud vendors mentioned above are

currently available to the general public and common in

SMEs. There are many advantages to this cloud solution

including:

1. Data availability and Resiliency

2. Technical Expertise and Support

3. Flexibility

4. Inexpensive Initial Costs

5. Resource Optimisation

The three most prominent drawbacks to a private

cloud are Data security, constant costs and the fact they

never offer a return on investment, only a reduction in

spending in some circumstances.

Recommendations

After analyzing the potential public cloud vendors, it

would appear, that for GIL, moving to a public cloud or

hybrid cloud isn’t cost efficient.

With 80 office subscription being close to £10,000

and a like for like infrastructure with AWS that doesn’t

meet the requirements being over £1,500 there is little

attraction to public cloud. Besides there being no upfront

costs or the need to remediate servers every 5-9 years,

which are a big expense not accounted for in this paper.

If the company was smaller a SaaS based public cloud

infrastructure could have been a potential solution but

not for a SME of GIL’s size.

4 CALCULATING EXISTING

POWER CONSUMPTION

4.1 Mathematical Optimisation

To propose the best cloud solution, we must first

establish the current infrastructure’s annual cost

projections. This is done by factoring in 2 reoccurring

costs. Though lighting, property (if not bought outright),

labour, and networking all effect pricing the largest

tangible factors of running a datacenter are:

1. Running Costs

2. Cooling Costs

The price of energy will vary by location but in the

interest of the business case and this paper, power will

hold the constant value of £0.14 per kWh (Average cost

per kWh of electricity in the UK according to the Energy

Saving Trust, March 2016).

As GIL is one of the many partners of Hewlett

Packard Enterprise all their servers have been bought

from HPE and can thusly have their power consumption

estimated through the “HPE Power Assist Tool”. To

apply the business case, we must calculate the total

power usage of the 7 rack servers and 1 tower server.

The rack servers currently in production are all “Proliant

DL380 G6s” and the tower server currently in operation

is a “ProLiant ML370 G6”. The Proliant DL380 G6’s

max Watt Usage per hour, is 131.11 W and the Proliant

ML370 G6’s max is 425.32.

Table 5: GIL’s Total Wattage.

Model Watt Amount Total Watt

Proliant

DL380 G6

131 W 7 917.77

ProLiant

ML370 G6

425 W 1 425.32

Total 1343.09

Developing a Power Efﬁcient Private Cloud Ready Infrastructure for Small-Medium Sized Enterprises

303

Running Costs

After receiving the datacenter’s Watt usage per hour, it

is possible to calculate the annual costs using the

formula below to convert power consumption figures

into, kilwatts and then running costs:

(

∗

1000

)=kWh*ElectricityCostperkWh

(1)

Using this formula, we can calculate the annual running

cost of the datacenter to be £1647.17.

Cooling Costs

Cooling costs are the second quantifiable factor that can

be measured to analyse a company’s operational costs.

To do this we must know how many British Thermal

Units the datacenter produces. A British Thermal Unit

(BTU) is defined as the amount of energy needed to raise

the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1 degree

Fahrenheit. The following formula can be used to

calculate a datacenters BTU:

=∗3.14(2)

(2)

Since we have already establishing that GIL uses 11,757

Kilo Watts per hour we can use the cooling cost formula

to calculate the Datacenter’s BTU; 4217.30026 BTU.

After establishing both a datacenters Watt usage and

BTU the following widely used formula can be used to

calculate, kwh then cooling costs:



(

∗ℎ

)

∗0.293

1000



=ℎ∗ℎ

(3)

Using this formula, we can estimate that a minimum of

£1515.43 a year is being spent on cooling.

Adding this figure to the running costs we can

establish that the annual cost of running and cooling

GIL’s datacenter is £3,162.59.

4.2 Creating and Costing a Private

Cloud

To create a private cloud one must attain the components

that make a private cloud possible. GIL is a partner of

HP so for this paper we will be converging their

infrastructure using HP software and hardware when

appropriate.

Converged Infrastructure Cost

To attain a private cloud GIL could virtualize and

consolidate their current infrastructure, add storage,

install relevant software and have a private cloud.

However, this project’s objective involves considering

the longevity of the datacenter and missing an

opportunity to reduce cabling, reduce consumption and

easy future scalability would be counterproductive.

For this reason, attaining the following hardware and

software displayed in table 6 has been proposed to

optimize efficiency, reduce operational costs and

enhance flexibility.

Table 6: Cost of Converged Infrastructure Cloud.

Software Cost

Windows Server 2008 R2 x 2 N/a

Convergence Tool (OneView) Free

Cloud Platform (OpenStack) Free

VSphere Essential Kit (No

Vcentre, 3 servers with 2 cores

each license)

£430.50 [30]

HPE BLc3000 Enclosure (2

Pwr, 6 fans)

£5,443 [26]

HPE ProLiant BL660c Gen9

(20 Cores, 64GB Ram, 1TB)

£10,290 [27]

HPE Storageworks D2200sb £1,368.42 [28]

9 x 1TB 6G SATA £1,251.72 [29]

Networking and Cabling N/a

£18,923 (£17,030.8 with HPE Partner discount)

GIL’s current infrastructure has 18 Cores, 18GB of

RAM, 8TB of storage and no redundancies. By having

no power or cooling redundancies GIL datacenter would

be considered a Tier I datacenter.

If GIL were to purchase the proposed technology in

table 6 their datacenter would have a resource pool of 20

Cores, 64GB of RAM and 11TB of storage, with power

and cooling redundancy. Thus, classifying the new

infrastructure as a tier II datacenter. Additional memory

has been added to host new software and give

Production and Sale an extra TB of storage. One core

has also been allocated to the print server to enhance

processing power.

Using HPE’s “Power Advisor” and the formulas

mentioned in earlier section we can calculate the private

cloud’s operational costs to be £1,843 a year (13,169

Kw), £1,318.87 less (9,420 kw less).

5 SOLAR TECHNOLOGY

As public image makes or breaks a company and the

future price of electricity becomes unpredictable

exploiting solar energy to produce electricity is

becoming a widely-adopted greener alternative to the

grid.

Breeze claims that, despite incurring few early

adopters due to high initial costs, skepticism and fears of

inefficiency, solar power has really grown in the last

three decades. However, it’s important to note that solar

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304

power still isn’t an all-encompassing solution to the grid.

There are four key factors that one needs to consider

outside of cost when analyzing a solar powered

infrastructure.

The first factor is, the direction/ angle of the roof,

second, any shading that could impede on production,

third, the space allocated to the solar panel installation

and finally, the time of year. In some hotter countries

temperature will also have to be considered as a fifth

factor to insure panels don’t over heat, fortunately for

the UK however, this isn’t a worry.

In this paper, the business case experiences no space

limitation and no hard shading. For this reason, an

accurate cost benefit analysis can be made from the

following main considerations: Solar panels cost &

efficiency, hours of sunlight, and the angle of the panels.

5.1 Solar Panels Cost & Efficiency

Akin to all other fields of technology there is a plethora

of hardware that all try to achieve a common goal. In

Solar Technology, there are many types of solar panels

currently in production. The three most popular panels

according to the Eco Experts are: Monocrystalline,

Polycrystalline and amorphous (“Thin Film”).

Each manufacturer should provide an in-situ

efficiency rating for what's possible on a typical

installation, called the PTC (Performance Test

Conditions) rating. Efficiency ratings are established in

a lab by projecting 100 Watts of sun light on to a solar

panel and measuring the output; normally between 10-

20%. According to the eco expert, PTC rating have an

accuracy rating of 85-95%. For this reason, all efficiency

rating in this paper will be deducted the average; 10%.

Monocrystalline

The Eco Experts defines Monocrystalline solar panels as

using wafer thin cuts of silicon crystals. Since

monocrystalline panels are made out of the highest-

grade silicon and cut under strict guidelines they’re

known to produce the highest levels of efficiency.

SunPower, a prolific manufacturer of Monocrystalline

Panels, has achieved record breaking efficiency ratings

of 21.5% PTC on their latest X21-345 model.

Described as the “cleanest panels” on the market

Monocrystalline solar panels also have the longest

warranties and take up the least space due to their high

efficiency. There would be little competition to be had in

this section of the paper if they also weren’t the most

expensive panels to manufacturer and purchase.

SunPower do not publicly publish the cost of their

solar panels so this panel will not be used in the

comparison, as a substitute the Perlight PLM-300M-60

MONO will be used instead.

Table 7: Information Taken from the Product Information

page on BuyPVDirect.

Model

PerLight PLM-300M-60

MONO

Max. Output

300w

Max. Efficiency

18.9%

Cell Count

60 (6x10)

Warranty

25 year Guarantee

Other

The most efficient panels

in this paper.

Price

£165 (£198 with VAT)

Polycrystalline

The process of producing polycrystalline panels is not as

sophisticated as producing Monocrystalline panels.

Polycrystalline Panels are made using the off cuts of

different silicon melted down into a mould to form their

semiconductor. They’re less efficient than their

monocrystalline competitor but this efficiency gap has

become less noticeable in recent years.

According to the Eco Expert, the most efficient

polycrystalline panels are produced by SunTech. In 2016

SunTech released the STP265/WEM, a polycrystalline

solar panel with 16.3% efficiency. Sadly, these panels

aren’t currently avaliable to purchase so the following

SunTech panels have been selected as a close substitute:

Table 8: Information Taken from the Product information

page on BuyPVDirect.

Model

SunTech STP280-24

Max. Output

280w

Max. Efficiency

15.4

Cell Count

72 (6x12)

Warranty

----

Other

The most cost efficient

panel on BuyPVDirect

Price

£105 (£126 with VAT)

Amorphous

Amorphous or “thin film” solar panels are a newer

technology than crystalline and polycrystalline panels.

They are made by placing several thin layers of

photovoltaic material onto a substrate. They are the

cheapest panels in this paper and the least efficient.

They’re flexible and are rarely implemented for

longevity. Depending on the technology, thin-film

module prototypes have reached efficiencies between 7–

13% and production modules operate at about 9%. Thus

proving the claim that monocrystalline panels can be

four times more efficient than Amorphous (thin-film)

based solar panels. With efficiency levels this low,

amorphous panels will not be included in price

comparisons.

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5.2 Hours of Sunlight (Buxton,

Derbyshire)

The United Kingdom and Sunshine are often treated as

two mutually exclusive terms. However, though solar

panels produce more power in countries such as Spain

or South Africa, solar panels still function in the UK.

Their output is hindered by rain, overcast and shorter

days but most solar panels still provide a return on

investment within seven years.

To engineer a solar powered solution to cover GIL’s

operational costs it is important to know the amount of

sunlight that is bestowed on their offices. Suitably, The

Met office has been monitoring the average amount of

sunlight in Buxton Derbyshire since 1981 to 2010; using

this data the following table has been produced.

Table 9: A table to show the Annual Sunshine in Buxton,

Derbyshire.

Month Sunshine (hours)

Jan 41.2

Feb 63.1

Mar 93.8

Apr 140.2

May 180.2

Jun 166.4

Jul 178.5

Aug 167.6

Sep 123.8

Oct 91.4

Nov 51

Dec 37.7

Annual

1334.8 (1335r)

Table 9 shows us that annually we can expect 1335

hours of sunlight to be shed on GIL’s offices. This

equates to a mean of 3.71 hours of sunlight per day. This

is essential knowledge as with most solar panels

producing a test conditions efficiency rating of 10-20%,

every hour needs to be considered and consumed.

5.3 Panel Elevation

Leading us to the next section, to get the most from

solar energy, it is essential to point the panels in the

direction that captures the most sun. Though tracking

panels that follow the sun are a possible solution as

they have been proven to increase solar production by

10% in the winter and 40% in the summer when

compared to stationary panels. They’re often

expensive, unreliable, and implemented on the

ground for space efficiency. As GIL is installing their

panels on the roof of their office, require a quick

return on investment and claim space “shouldn’t be

an issue”, the best case solution in this instance are

manual tilt panels.

By analyzing the data presented to us in figure 2

we can start to understand the amount of potential

solar energy lost to inefficiencies and see the potential

benefit of adjusting panels.

Figure 2: A graph of the sun path in Buxton, Derbyshire.

Generated using a tool from the University of Oregon.

In Figure 2 the Y axis is the suns elevation in the

sky and the X axis is the location of the sun in the sky.

Through knowing this we can clearly see there is

more sunlight in the Summer (Jun) than there is in the

Winter (Dec). Figure 2 also visualizes what may seem

obvious: the angle of the panels in relation to the

angle of the sun and time spent in its direct raise

effects power out. For an efficient implementation of

solar panels we need to establish both what angle to

install the panels and what direction. Though

establishing the direction to install panels is common

knowledge in the solar community the angle isn’t.

Like how moss grows on trees, solar panels in the

northern hemisphere will be facing true south and in

the southern hemisphere solar panels will be facing

true north. If GIL were to implement south facing

solar panels on fixed brackets their optimum

efficiency would be 71.1%. If they implemented

adjustable brackets and adjusted them once in the

summer and once in the winter, they would see a 4%

increase in their solar harvest. Adjusting the bracket

any more than twice, let’s say four times, would

increase efficiency by 0.4% but the amount of effort

required for such a diminished return means it’s rarely

implemented and won’t be implemented in this paper.

Therefore GIL’s solar panels will be adjusted twice:

once on the 30

of March and again on the 12

September.

The perfect angulation of the panels according to

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306

the data presented in Figure 2 and the information

provided from Landua’s research is 28.3 in summer

and 65.6 in winter.

Recommendation

Examining the two panels proposed in this section

one would assume that at a glance the Perlight is the

supreme panel. Though the Perlight PLM-300M-60

MONO is more efficient, has a higher max output and

takes up less space, the cost being true to

monocrystalline panels is much more expensive.

Applying simple math we can deduce that the

Perlight panels on implementation delivering a 300

watt max output for £126 a panel produce 1.51 Watts

per £1 spent. SunTech’s STP280-24 on the other hand

produce 2.2 watts per £1 spent.

After selecting the SunTech’s STP280-24 solar

panels as the preferred panel we now need to calculate

how many panels will be required to produce enough

energy for the private cloud aforementioned in

section 4.2. The private cloud infrastructure designed

in 4.2 requires 13169.4 Kw a year. To produce this

much energy from 1335 hour of sunlight, 33 Suntech

panels costing £4,143.18 will be required. At this

point however, It’s important to mention that none of

the calculations in this paper have considered labour

costs.

6 PROPOSED SOLUTION

6.1 A Cloud Ready Infrastructure

Powered via Solar Panels

As the IT department wishes to host their datacenter

locally and public cloud have proven unaffordable the

following solution has been produced. The final

solution designed in section 4.2 will be implemented

in line with the solar solution devised in section 5.

The annual energy requirements for the new

datacenter are estimated to be 13,169 kW a year. To

satisfy this requirement and attain a private cloud the

following components need to be purchased 33

SunTech STP280-24 (£4,143.18).

• Adjustable mount brackets (N/a)

• Installation Labour (N/a)

• Maintenance (N/a)

• OneView (N/a)

• OpenStack (N/a)

• VSphere Essential Kit(£430.50)

• HPE BLc3000 Enclosure (£5,443)

• HPE ProLiant BL660c Gen9 (£10,290)

• HPE Storageworks D2200sb (£1,368.42)

• 9 x 1TB 6G SATA (£1,251.72)

• Networking and Cabling (N/a)

•

abour (N/a)

Figure 3: A graph showing the cost of each component

required to provide the solution.

With the HPE partner’s discount the total cost of

the private cloud infrastructure is £17,030.80. The

total cost of the Suntech solar panels is £4,143.18. A

total of £25,000 pounds was allocated to reducing

operational costs and achieving the requirements

mentioned in earlier section and a total of £21,173.98

is required for this solution. Despite the private cloud

infrastructure reducing power consumption by over

50% introducing it without solar power wouldn’t be

cost efficient. The following graph (Figure 4) displays

the payback period and return over the proposed 9

year limit. It is important to note that unlike many

other investments an investment in solar has

immediate return from the day it’s installed.

Figure 4: A bar chart displaying the retrun on Investment

for Solution 1.

Figure 5 was produced assuming the solar panels are

installed on the 1

of January 2017. At a glance an

observer would assume the solution offers a return on

invest in the last quarter of 2024, however figure 3

does not account for Net Present Value (NPV). NPV

is the difference between the present value of cash

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307

inflows and the present value of cash outflows. To put

it simply, the cash invested in 2017 will not be equal

to same amount in 2024. To calculate the NPV the

following formula has been implemented:

(4)

= net cash inflow during the period t

= total initial investment costs

r = discount rate

t = number of time periods

Using this formula we can establish that though the

project’s return on investment is £7,289.33 at the end

of the 9

year, the actual return on investment after

account for the NPV with a discount rate of 3.5 is

£2,886.01.

It is critical to this solution that the infrastructure

is reformed and the solar panels are installed in order

to achieve the business requirements and a return on

investment. Figure 4 shows how the savings are

divided. Showing that if either were implemented

separately there wouldn’t be a return on invest within

7 years.

Figure 5: A graph showing the cost of investment and

savings from both the cloud infrastructure and solar panels

associated with solution one.

When compared to the six requirements listed in section

2.4 we can be assured that the following requirements

have been met:

• R1: The Solution costs less than £25,000

(£21,173.98)

• R2: The Solution reduces power consumption

by 58%

• R3: The Solution provides the required

memory, a reliable virtual rendering server, the

new file servers will be running Microsoft’s

Onedrive allowing office access and file

consistency. One of the two redundant cores

could also be assigned to the print server to

resolve print issues.

• R4: The solution simplifies IT management

lifecycles through consolidating resources and

allowing for the introducing of automation.

• R5: The solution provides an undeniable

return on invest within 9 years (NPV -

£2,886.01)

• R6: The solution is installed in their Buxton

offices meeting the soft requirement presented

by the IT department.

7 CONCLUSIONS

To conclude, in this paper, we intended to develop an

understanding of cloud, virtualization, solar power

and the potential benefits they could bring to an SME

keen on reducing their operational costs. The

fictitious business featured in this paper had

requirements that were common in siloed

infrastructures and were also commonly resolved

through cloud implementation.

At first, implementing a private cloud for GIL was

an unattractive prospect as it was found to have high

initial costs and a slow return on invest. However,

with the implementation of solar panels this paper

found private clouds to offer the largest return on

investment over nine years without compromising on

scalability, consolidated management or the

customer’s requirements.

Public clouds, despite seeming like a valid option

in the beginning, appeared to be a poor investment for

an enterprise of this size. Nonetheless, the consensus

gained in this paper is that though they offer poor

return for SME they have the potential to provide

benefits to small businesses, large business and

SME’s willing to incur costs for an agile

infrastructure scalability and automated management

lifecycles.

For enterprises that, wish to retain an on-site

datacenter, demand a return on investment, and insist

on low power consumption we suggest the solution

proposed in this paper.

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