Two most interesting pieces of research to emerge in the past fortnight provide for the first time a sense of the scale of datacentres globally, the prognosis for their future growth and the impact of Cloud as both a driver and gamechanger.

In the first, Cisco provides a forecast of global datacentre traffic:

• Annual global datacentre IP traffic will reach 4.8 zettabytes by the end of 2015. In 2015, global datacentre IP traffic will reach 402 exabytes per month.
• Global datacentre IP traffic will increase fourfold over the next 5 years. Overall, datacentre IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33 percent from 2010 to 2015.

_{Annual Global DataCentre Traffic to 2012   Source: Cisco Inc}

The Cisco Global Cloud Index predicts an important transition will occur in 2014. At that point, more than 50% of global workloads will take place in the cloud. For 2010 that number was just 21%. But Cisco predicts that it will rise to 57% by 2015.

In 2015, 34% of datacentre traffic will be associated with cloud-based applications, while 66% will be associated with traditional datacentre applications. In comparison, only 11% of datacentre traffic was cloud-based in 2010, while 89% was traditional data.

For a copy of the full report visit Cisco

In the second piece of research, Emerson Network Power examined the growth and growing importance of the datacentre in its 2011 State of the Data Center infographic reflecting those observations. The scale of data is staggering:

This year, mankind will create 1.2 trillion gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 75     billion 16 GB iPods. That’s more than enough for every person on earth to own 10     iPods.

The growing economic dependency on the datacentre has consequences when downtime occurs:

If all 509,147 data centers went out 2.5 times (based on an average) for a duration of     134 minutes, that would equal 2,842,737 hours of downtime, at a total loss of $426     billion a year. That’s enough to buy every person in Munich, Germany, a yacht.

The full Emerson info-graphic is available to view

By James Ferguson, DatacentreNews