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By Vincent Capasso
First off what the heck is a Zettabyte? Answer: About a 1000 exabytes, or 1,000,000 petabytes.
This chart give the actual values of data measurements for Kilobyte through Yootabyte. Yes, I had to look it up myself.
Data Measurements in Bytes
kilobyte (kB) 10 exp 3
megabyte (MB) 10 exp 6
gigabyte (GB) 10 exp 9
terabyte (TB) 10 exp 12
petabyte (PB) 10 exp 15
exabyte (EB) 10 exp 18
zettabyte (ZB) 10 exp 21
yottabyte (YB) 10 exp 24
Any database, systems, or network administrator that has worked in a large data center has most likely worked with Gigabytes, Terabytes, or Petabytes of data at one point but the large value of a Zettabyte of data is normally a measure of an aggregation of data.
As of 2011, no storage system has achieved one zettabyte of information. The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes in 2006.
This has increased rapidly however, as during the 2011 Fiscal Year, Seagate reported selling a combined total of 330 exabytes of hard drives.
According to data released recently as part of Cisco’s Global Cloud Index, total IP traffic over data center networks will reach 4.8 zettabytes a year by 2015. Cloud computing based applications will account for one-third of it, or 1.6 zettabytes. The report depicts the hard core facts: the public Internet traffic gets most of the attention among internet end users but the data centers are moving data around on very fast networks behind the scenes to make the web run.
The report estimates that by 2015, data center networks will handle about five times the amount of data that will travel across the entire Internet.
According to Cisco, data center traffic in aggregate reached approximately 1.1 zettabytes in 2010. They project data center will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent through 2015. Cisco estimates that traffic coming from cloud based services and apps will grow at a CAGR of 66 percent from 121 exabytes in 2010 to 133 exabytes a month in 2015.
The Evolution of Data Center Traffic: From Peer to Peer to Cloud Based
From 2000 to 2008, peer-to-peer file sharing dominated Internet traffic. As a result, the majority of Internet traffic did not touch a data center, but was communicated directly between Internet users. Since 2008, most Internet traffic has originated or terminated in a data center. Data center traffic will continue to dominate Internet traffic for the foreseeable future, but the nature of data center traffic will undergo a fundamental transformation brought about by cloud applications, services, and infrastructure. By 2015, one-third of data center traffic will be cloud traffic.
According the the Cisco report in 2010, 77 percent of traffic remains within the data center, and this will decline only slightly to 76 percent by 2015.
The fact that the majority of traffic remains within the data center can be attributed to several factors:
1. Functional separation of application servers and storage, which requires all replication and backup traffic to traverse the data center
2. Functional separation of database and application servers, such that traffic is generated whenever an application reads from or writes to a central database
3. Parallel processing, which divides tasks into multiple smaller tasks and sends them to multiple servers, contributing to internal data center traffic
The ratio of traffic exiting the data center to traffic remaining within the data center might be expected to increase over time, because video files are bandwidth-heavy and do not require database or processing traffic commensurate with their file size. However, the ongoing virtualization of data centers offsets this trend. Virtualization of storage, for example, increases traffic within the data center because virtualized storage is no longer local to a rack or server. Table 1 provides details for global data center traffic growth rates.
Global Cloud IP Traffic Growth
In summary data center traffic on a global scale grows at 33 percent CAGR, but cloud data center traffic grows at a much faster rate of 66 percent CAGR, or twelvefold growth between 2010 and 2015.
In terms of data center and cloud traffic, we are firmly in the zettabyte era. Global data center traffic will grow four-fold from 2010 to 2015 and reach 4.8 zettabytes annually by 2015. A subset of data center traffic is cloud traffic, which will grow 12-fold over the forecast period and represent over one-third of all data center traffic by 2015.
A key traffic driver as well as an indicator of the transition to cloud computing is increasing data center virtualization. The growing number of end user devices combined with consumer and business users preference or need to stay connected is creating new network requirements. The evolution of cloud services is driven in large part by users' expectations to access applications and content anytime, from anywhere, over any network and with any device. Cloud-based data centers can support more virtual machines and workloads per physical server than traditional datacenters. By 2014, more than 50% of all workloads will be processed in the cloud.
A full version of the Cisco report is available here.
Cross posted from myITview.com
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