Cloud computing poised for growth spurt

cloud computing will account for nearly 34% of traffic at the world's data centres, the huge computing stations that now process and distribute most of the Internet's information, Los Angeles Times reports.

Last year, the cloud accounted for only about 11% of data centre traffic.

Cisco's first "Cloud Index" report says overall traffic at data centres will more than triple by 2015, to 4.8 zettabytes from about 1.5 zettabytes in 2011. Cisco is one of the world's largest vendors of the networking hardware that sends data around the Internet and between servers in a given data centre.

The report said the vast majority of the data centre traffic is not caused by users, but by the data centres and clouds themselves, undertaking activities that are largely non-transparent to users - like backup and replication, eWeek says.

By 2015, 76% of data centre traffic will remain within the data centre itself, as workloads migrate between various virtual machines and background tasks take place; 17% of the total traffic leaves the data centre to be delivered to the user, while an additional 7% of total traffic is generated between data centres through activities such as cloud-bursting, data replication and updates.

In 2010, 21% of workloads were processed in a cloud-based data centre with 79% being handled in a traditional data centre. The report predicts 2014 would be the first year where the balance of workloads shifts toward the cloud for the first time - 51% of total workloads will be in a cloud environment versus 49% in the traditional IT space. Overall, the data centre workload from 2010 to 2015 is growing 2.7-fold; however, the cloud workload from 2010 to 2015 is growing more than seven-fold over the forecast period.

Cisco generated its Global Cloud Index by modelling and analysing data from a number of primary and secondary sources, including data from data centres around the world, more than 45 million broadband speed tests, and third-party market forecasts, The Journal notes.