Cisco: Global data center traffic to quadruple by 2015

Global data center traffic growth will quadruple between 2010 and 2015, according to research released today from Cisco. A strong driver of that growth will be a business shift toward cloud-based services, which will increase 12-fold over the same time period, Cisco said.

“Networking and data centers and the cloud are intrinsically linked,” said Doug Webster, senior director of global service provider marketing for Cisco, in an interview. Recognizing that, Cisco undertook the new research, to be known as the Cisco Global Cloud Index, with the goal of gaining market insight that could be shared with customers, Webster said.

The new research was based on third-party data and on 30 terabytes of data gathered from 10 data centers worldwide. Among the 10 were data centers dedicated to just a single large enterprise and others that were open to multiple enterprises.

“Lessons learned within those 10 data centers were applied globally,” Webster said.

2014 forecast to be the cloud tipping point
One of the biggest surprises in the research results was the composition of data center traffic, said Webster. More than three-quarters (77%) of data center traffic remained within the data center in 2010 and that percentage is expected to remain virtually unchanged moving forward—representing 76% of total data center traffic in 2015.

Traffic between data centers and end users was just 18% of the overall traffic level in 2010, and traffic between data centers was just 5% for that year. Those numbers also are expected to change minimally between now and 2015, when they will be 17% and 7% respectively, Cisco said.

The Cisco Global Cloud Index predicts an important tipping point to occur in 2014. At that point, more than 50% of global workloads will occur in the cloud. For 2010 that number was just 21%. But Cisco predicts that it will rise to 57% by 2015.

In 2015, 34% of data center traffic will be associated with cloud-based applications, while 66% will be associated with traditional data center applications, Cisco predicts. In comparison, only 11% of data center traffic was cloud-based in 2010, while 89% was traditional data.

Economics will drive the shift toward the cloud, Cisco says. “The cloud data center delivers up to 50% savings in total cost of ownership,” Webster explained. The greatest savings occur at a level of about 1,000 equivalent servers, he said, but even organizations with dozens of servers will see a savings.