Global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data centre traffic, will grow six—fold by 2016 led by the Middle East and Africa, according to networking major Cisco.
It will grow from 683 exabytes of annual traffic in 2011 to 4.3 zettabytes by 2016, clipping a 44 per cent combined annual growth rate, said the second annual Cisco Global Cloud Index today.
The report also forecasts that global data centre traffic will grow four—fold to 6.6 zettabytes, which is about 1.5 years of continuous music streaming for the world’s population in 2016, annually by 2016.
Global cloud traffic will account for nearly two—thirds of total global data centre traffic, it says, will grow from 39 per cent (57 EB per month and 683 EB annually) in 2011 to 64 per cent (almost two—thirds or 355 EB per month and 4.3 ZB annually) in 2016.
The vast majority of the data centre traffic is not caused by end—users but by data centres and cloud—computing workloads used in activities that are virtually invisible to individuals, says the report.
An Exabyte or EB is 10 raised to the power 18, while a Zettabyte or ZB is 10 raised to the power 21.
For 2011—16, Cisco sees about 76 per cent of data centre traffic will be largely generated by storage, production and development data.
Region—wise, the report predicts that the Middle East and Africa will have the highest cloud traffic growth rate by 2016, while the Asia—Pacific region will process the most cloud workloads, followed by North America.