By 2015, 76 percent of data center traffic will remain within the data center itself as workloads migrate.
In its inaugural Global Cloud Index (2010-2015), Cisco estimated
global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes to
reach a total of 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015, a 66 percent compound
annual growth rate. One zettabyte is equal to a sextillion bytes or a
trillion gigabytes. To put that in perspective, 1.6 zettabytes is
approximately equivalent to, 22 trillion hours of streaming music, 5
trillion hours of business Web conferencing with a webcam or 1.6
trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming.
The cloud is the fastest growing component of data center traffic,
which itself will grow 4-fold at a 33 percent CAGR to reach 4.8
zettabytes annually by 2015. Cloud is also estimated today to be 11
percent of data center traffic, growing to more than 33 percent of the
total by 2015. Cloud is becoming a critical element for the future of
IT and delivery of video and content.
The report said the vast majority of the data center traffic is not
caused by users but by the data centers and clouds themselves
undertaking activities that are largely non-transparent to users - like
backup and replication. By 2015, 76 percent of data center traffic will
remain within the data center itself as workloads migrate between
various virtual machines and background tasks take place, 17 percent of
the total traffic leaves the data center to be delivered to the user,
while an additional 7 percent of total traffic is generated between
data centers through activities such as cloud-bursting, data
replication and updates.
In 2010, 21 percent of workloads were processed in a cloud-based
data center with 79 percent being handled in a traditional data center.
The report predicts 2014 would be the first year where the balance of
workloads shifts toward the cloud for the first time - 51 percent of
total workloads will be in a cloud environment versus 49 percent in the
traditional IT space. Overall, the data center workload from 2010-2015
is growing 2.7-fold; however, the cloud workload from 2010-2015 is
growing more than 7-fold over the forecast period.
"Cloud and data center traffic is exploding, driven by user demand
to access volumes of content on the devices of their choice. The
result: greater data center virtualization and relevance of the network
for cloud applications and the need to make sense of a dynamically
evolving situation," said Suraj Shetty, vice president of product and
solutions marketing for Cisco. "The Cisco Global Cloud Index provides
insight into this traffic growth and trends so that organizations can
make strategic long-term decisions. We will continue to develop and
release the Cisco Global Cloud Index on a regular and ongoing annual
basis, contributing to -cloud readiness' efforts worldwide."
The index is generated from a modeling and analysis of various
primary and secondary sources, including more than 30 terabytes of data
generated each month over the past year from a variety of data centers
around the globe, measurements of more than 45 million broadband-speed
tests and third-party market forecasts. The index also includes a
"Cloud Readiness" analysis of major geographic regions regarding their
networks' abilities to support various types of business and consumer
cloud-computing services.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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