Global data centre traffic to triple by 2018: Cisco

New York: Data centre traffic is poised to triple by 2018 from the current levels as almost half of the world's population goes online, a Cisco study said Tuesday.

The US-based networking solutions giant's fourth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2013-2018) forecast a strong growth of cloud traffic, workloads and storage with the private cloud segment emerging significantly larger than public cloud.

Cisco said: "Over the next five years, the study projects data centre traffic to nearly triple, with cloud representing 76 percent of total data centre traffic.

"By 2018, half of the world's population will have residential Internet access and more than half of those users' (53 percent) content will be supported by personal cloud storage services."

The study forecast that global data centre traffic will nearly triple from 2013 to 2018 with a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent, growing from 3.1 zettabytes/year in 2013 to 8.6 zettabytes/year in 2018. A zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes, the firm added.

"The 8.6 zettabytes of data centre traffic predicted for 2018 is equivalent to streaming all of movies (approximately 500,000) and television shows (3 million) ever made in ultra-high definition (UHD) 250,000 times," the study said.

Global cloud traffic is growing faster than the overall global data centre traffic. In 2013, cloud accounted for 54 percent of total data centre traffic, and, by 2018, cloud will account for 76 percent of total data centre traffic.

Data centre traffic includes data centre-to-user traffic along with data centre-to-data centre traffic and traffic that remains within data centres, it added.

By 2018, 53 percent of all residential Internet users globally will use personal cloud storage and the average consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 811 megabytes per month by 2018, compared to 186 megabytes per month in 2013, the Cisco study said.

"When people discuss cloud, they often focus on public cloud services or public cloud storage services. However, a very significant majority of today's cloud workloads are actually processed in private cloud environment," Cisco Senior VP (Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions) Kelly Ahuja said.

Even with public cloud workloads having significant growth, by 2018, almost 70 percent of cloud workloads will still be private cloud-related, requiring the ability of workloads to bridge across a hybrid private/public cloud environment, he added.