In In the inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010 2015) issued recently, 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 percent 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.
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 information technology (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 non-transparent to end 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 end user, while an additional 7 percent of total traffic is generated between data centers through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates.
The Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010 2015) 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 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.
It 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.
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