Nearly 60 percent of hyperscale data centers are expected to deploy SDN / NFV solutions over the next five years, says Cisco.
By 2020, 44 percent of traffic within data centers will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms against 23 percent in 2015 as operators strive for greater efficiencies, said Cisco in its Cisco Global Cloud Index report.
Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are helping to flatten data center architectures and streamline traffic flows.
Hyperscale data centers will grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020. Hyperscale data center traffic is projected to quintuple over the next five years. These infrastructures will account for 47 percent of total data center installed servers and support 53 percent of all data center traffic by 2020.
“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,” said Doug Webster, vice president of Service Provider Marketing, Cisco.
By 2020, cloud data center traffic will reach 14.1 ZB per year against 3.9 ZB per year in 2015.
By 2020, traditional data center traffic will reach 1.3 ZB per year against 827 exabytes (EB) per year in 2015.
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 will grow to 11.9 by 2020 from 7.3 in 2015. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density will grow modestly to 3.5 by 2020 from 2.2 in 2015.
By 2020, 68 percent (298 million) of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers against 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).
By 2020, 59 percent (2.3 billion users) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage against 47 percent (1.3 billion users) in 2015.
By 2020, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.7 GB per month, compared to 513 MB per month in 2015.
By 2020, data center storage installed capacity will grow to 1.8 ZB up from 382 EB in 2015, nearly a 5-fold growth.
By 2020, the total installed data storage capacity in cloud data centers will account for 88 percent share of total DC storage capacity against 64.9 percent in 2015.
The data stored in data centers will quintuple by 2020 to reach 915 EB by 2020, up 5.3-fold (a CAGR of 40 percent) from 171 EB in 2015.
Big data will reach 247 EB by 2020, up almost 10-fold from 25 EB in 2015. Big data will represent 27 percent of data stored in data centers by 2020 against 15 percent in 2015.
Data generated (but not necessarily stored) by IoT will reach 600 ZB per year by 2020, 275 times higher than projected traffic going from data centers to end users/devices (2.2 ZB); 39 times higher than total projected data center traffic (15.3 ZB).
The amount of data stored on devices (5.3 ZB) will be 5 times higher than data stored in data centers by 2020.
In 2016, 132 countries met the single advanced application criteria for fixed networks against 119 countries in 2015.
In 2016, 89 countries met the single advanced application criteria for mobile networks against 81 countries in 2015.
Cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020, said Cisco.
This growth in cloud traffic is due to increased migration to cloud architectures due to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centers.
With greater data center virtualization, cloud operators are able to achieve operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance.
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.
IoT/analytics/database workloads are growing the most in terms of share of business workloads with collaboration and compute workloads largely maintaining their share.
By 2020, database/analytics/Internet of Things (IoT) workloads will account for 22 percent of total business workloads, compared to 20 percent 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 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.
