Cisco forecasts heavy cloud

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:56

Cisco - well known for its regular visual networking index forecasts of global video traffic - has unveiled the inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index in which it estimates that global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from an annual total of 130 exabytes in 2010 to 1.6 zettabytes (one thousand billion gigabytes) by 2015, a 66 percent compound annual growth rate. Cisco has also created a new global cloud computing business unit.

According to Cisco "Cloud is the fastest growing component of data centre traffic, which itself will grow four-fold at a 33 percent CAGR to reach 4.8 zettabytes annually by 2015. Cloud is also estimated today to be 11 percent of data centre traffic, growing to more than 33 percent of the total by 2015."

Not surprisingly Cisco concludes that: "Cloud is becoming a critical element for the future of information technology (IT) and delivery of video and content." And to better exploit this growing market, Cisco has combined its Network Management Technology Group (NMTG) and two other business units into a new Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group. (see below)

Cisco adds: "The vast majority of the data centre traffic is not caused by end users but by the data centres and clouds themselves undertaking activities that are largely non-transparent to end users - like backup and replication. By 2015, 76 percent of data centre traffic will remain within the data centre itself as workloads migrate between various virtual machines and background tasks take place.

"Seventeen percent of the total traffic leaves the data centre to be delivered to the end user, while an additional seven percent of total traffic is generated between data centres through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates."

According to Cisco, its Global Cloud Index has been "generated from a modelling and analysis of various primary and secondary sources, including more than 30 terabytes of data generated each month over the past year from a variety of data centres around the globe, measurements of more than 45 million broadband-speed tests and third-party market forecasts."

The Index also includes a 'workload transition' forecast on the workload shift from traditional data centres to the cloud as well as a 'Cloud Readiness' analysis of major geographic regions regarding their networks' abilities to support various types of business and consumer cloud-computing services."

Cisco has produced a white paper that provides the detailed findings of the study and a description of the methodology.

Cisco forms new cloud unit
According to a report in Network World (US)  Cisco has combined its Network Management Technology Group (NMTG) and two other business units into a new Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group.

Network World said it had obtained an internal Cisco memo authored by Cisco CTO and senior vice president of engineering Padmasree Warrior and Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Service Provider Group announcing formation of the group "to align engineering and services in an effort to gain market share in cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS)."

It said Cisco had confirmed creation of the unit, which in addition to NMTG has absorbed its Intelligent Automation Services business unit and Service Delivery Platform operations.