Cloud computing traffic to grow 12-fold by 2015: Cisco

In the inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010-15), Cisco estimates global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes to reach a total of 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015, a 66 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). One zettabyte is equal to a sextillion bytes or a trillion gigabytes.

1.6 zettabytes is approximately equivalent to 22 trillion hours of streaming music, or 5 trillion hours of business Web conferencing with a webcam, or 1.6 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming.

Cloud is the fastest growing component of data center traffic, which itself will grow four-fold at a 33 per cent CAGR to reach 4.8 zettabytes annually by 2015. Cloud is also estimated today to be 11 per cent of data center traffic, growing to more than 33 per cent of the total by 2015. Cloud is becoming a critical element for the future of IT and delivery of video and content.

The vast majority of the data center traffic is not caused by end users, but by the data centers and clouds themselves undertaking activities that are largely transparent to end users – like backup and replication. By 2015, 76 per cent of data center traffic will remain within the data center itself as workloads migrate between various virtual machines and background tasks take place, 17 per cent of the total traffic leaves the data center to be delivered to the end user, while an additional 7 per cent of total traffic is generated between data centers through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates.

Suraj Shetty, Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing, Cisco, remarked, “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. The Cisco Global Cloud Index provides insight into this traffic growth and trends so that organisations 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.”

Overview
The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010-15) was developed to estimate global data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol traffic growth and trends. As the network and data center are becoming intrinsically linked in the delivery of cloud services, this study complements existing network traffic studies to provide new insights and visibility into the emerging trends affecting data center and cloud architectures.

The Cisco Global Cloud 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 Cisco Global Cloud Index also includes a “workload transition” forecast on the workload shift from traditional data centers to the cloud as well as a “Cloud Readiness” analysis of major geographic regions regarding their networks’ abilities to support various types of business and consumer cloud-computing services.

Highlights
Cloud will account for one-third of total data center traffic: Globally, cloud traffic will grow from just 11 per cent (11 exabytes per month and 130 exabytes annually) of total data center traffic in 2010 to more than a third of total data center traffic (34 per cent, specifically, 137 exabytes per month and 1.6 zettabytes annually) by 2015. Greater virtualisation and improved economies of scale will be a key driver of the cloud transition.

Global cloud traffic growing twice as fast as global data center traffic: The transition to cloud services is driving global cloud traffic at a growth rate that is twice as great as global data center traffic. Global data center traffic will grow four-fold (at 33 per cent CAGR) from 2010 to 2015, while global cloud traffic will grow 12-fold (at 66 per cent CAGR) over the same period.
Cloud data centers offer better performance, higher utilization and greater ease of management than traditional data centers. Virtualization serves as a major catalyst in enabling hardware and software consolidation, greater automation and an integrated security approach.

Peak end-user activity more than 2.5 times average in 2015: Due predominately to the rise in video-based consumer services, data-center-to-user traffic has some significant peaks in activity. Much like prime time viewing hours, average amount of data center traffic per hour during peak periods is expected to rise up to 2.5 times, requiring the need to plan for additional capacity from data centers and the cloud as well as from the network. The on-demand model of cloud is perfectly suited to serve this type of variable demand.