Middle East, Africa cloud traffic to be 86% of total data centre traffic by 2020Cisco yesterday released its Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), which reveals that global 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. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures and their ability to scale quickly and support more workloads than traditional data centres. ©scanrail via 123RF With greater virtualisation, 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 centre growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year’s report. The following business and consumer projections were revealed. Business• By 2020, business workloads will account for 72% (344.5 million) of total data centre workloads, compared to 79% (142.3 million) in 2015 (2.4-fold growth). Consumer• By 2020, consumer workloads will account for 28% (134.3 million) of total data centre workloads, compared to 21% (38.6 million) in 2015 (3.5-fold growth). “The IT industry has taken cloud computing from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution. With large global cloud deployments, operators are optimizing their data centre strategies to meet the growing needs of businesses and consumers,” said Andy MacDonald, vice president Global Service Providers; Middle East, Africa and Russia, Cisco. Hyperscale data centre impactFor the first time, Cisco also quantified and analysed the impact of hyperscale data centres. These data centres are expected to grow from 259 in 2015 to 485 by 2020. Hyperscale[1] data centre traffic is projected to quintuple over the next five years. These infrastructures will account for 47% of total data centre installed servers and support 53% of all data centre traffic by 2020. A key infrastructure trend is transforming hyperscale (and other) data centres. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are helping to flatten data centre architectures and streamline traffic flows. Over the next five years, nearly 60% of global hyperscale data centres are expected to deploy SDN/NFV solutions. By 2020, 44% of traffic within data centres will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23% in 2015) as operators strive for greater efficiencies. Middle East and Africa Global Cloud Index forecasted highlights and projectionsData centre traffic highlights• In Middle East and Africa, data centre traffic will reach 328 Exabytes per year (27 Exabytes per month) by 2019, up from 82 Exabytes per year (6.8 Exabytes per month) in 2014. Cloud traffic highlights• In Middle East and Africa, cloud data centre traffic will represent 86% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 61% in 2014. Traditional traffic highlights• In Middle East and Africa, traditional data centre traffic will represent 14% of total data centre traffic by 2019, compared to 39% in 2014. |