Cisco: By 2020, 92% of Workloads Will be Processed by Cloud Data Centers VS Traditional Data Centers

“With greater data center virtualization, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance. To better understand data center growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year’s report.”

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A key infrastructure trend is transforming hyperscale (and other) data centers. Software-defined networking and network functions virtualization are helping to flatten data center architectures and streamline traffic flows. Over the next five years, nearly 60 percent of global hyperscale data centers are expected to deploy SDN/NFV solutions. The survey reports, that by 2020, 44 percent of traffic within data centers will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23 percent in 2015) as operators strive for greater efficiencies.

“In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers of all types around the globe,” said Doug Webster, Vice President of Service Provider Marketing, Cisco. “Powered by video, IoT, SDN/NFV and more, we forecast this significant cloud migration and the increased amount of network traffic generated as a result to continue at a rapid rate as operators streamline infrastructures to help them more profitably deliver IP-based services businesses and consumers alike.”

In the report, the following business and consumer projections were revealed:

• Business workloads dominate data center applications and are growing.
  • Business workloads will grow by 2.4 fold from 2015 to 2020 but their overall share of data center workloads will decrease from 79 to 72 percent.

• Consumer workloads, while smaller in number, are growing faster. During the same time, consumer workloads will grow faster by 3.5 fold.
  • By 2020, consumer workloads will account for 28 percent (134.3 million) of total data center workloads, compared to 21 percent (38.6 million) in 2015.

• Video and social networking will lead the increase in consumer workloads, each respectively grows their percentage significantly.
  • By 2020: video streaming workloads will account for 34 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 29 percent in 2015; social networking workloads will account for 24 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 20 percent in 2015; search workloads will account for 15 percent of total consumer workloads, compared to 17 percent in 2015.

The report includes additional global cloud index forecasted highlights and projections, including:

1.  With cloud comes networking traffic.

• By 2020, cloud data center traffic will reach 14.1 ZB per year, up from 3.9 ZB per year in 2015. A zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes.
• By 2020, traditional data center traffic will reach 1.3 ZB per year, up from 827 exabytes (EB) per year in 2015.

2. Cloud dominates growth and outpaces traditional data center growth by 2020.

• By 2020, 92 percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; 8 percent will be processed by traditional data centers.
• Workload density (workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 7.3 in 2015 and will grow to 11.9 by 2020. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.2 in 2015 and will grow modestly to 3.5 by 2020.

3. Public cloud is growing faster than private cloud growth.

• By 2020, 68 percent (298 million) of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 49 percent (66.3 million) in 2015 (35 percent CAGR 2015-2020).
• By 2020, 32 percent (142 million) of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centers, down from 51 percent (69.7 million) in 2015 (15 percent CAGR 2015-2020).

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