As federal funding in many public non-profit organizations (NPO�s) seems to be dwindling, it is of the utmost\nimportance that efforts are focused on reducing operating costs of needy organizations, such as public schools. Our\napproach for reducing organizational costs is through the combined benefits of a high performance cloud architecture\nand low-power, thin-client devices. However, general-purpose private cloud architectures are not easily deployable\nby average users, or even those with some computing knowledge. For this reason, we propose a new vertical cloud\narchitecture, which is focused on ease of deployment and management, as well as providing organizations with\ncost-efficient virtualization and storage, and other organization-specific utilities. We postulate that if organizations are\nprovided with on-demand access to electronic resources in a way that is cost-efficient, then the operating costs may\nbe reduced, such that the user experience and organizational efficiency may be increased. In this paper we discuss\nour private vertical cloud architecture called THUNDER. Additionally, we introduce a number of methodologies that\ncould enable needy non-profit organizations to decrease costs and also provide many additional benefits for the\nusers. Specifically, this paper introduces our current implementation of THUNDER, details about the architecture, and\nthe software system that we have designed to specifically target the needs of underfunded organizations.
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