Server Market, Metro and WAN Bandwidth Now Driven by Hyperscale Data Centers

source: Cisco

The global server market now is driven by huge data centers, much as global wide area network bandwidth demand is shaped by those same hyperscale data center sites, while metro traffic likewise is shaped by internal data center traffic and data center-to-data center connections.

"The real driver of global growth continues to be the hyper-scale datacenter segment," Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt noted in a statement releasing the quarterly estimate. "The enterprise and small or mid-size business segments remain relatively flat as end users in these segments accommodated their increased application requirements through virtualization and considered cloud alternatives."

source: Cisco

OTT bypass--when OTT app providers terminate calls through an OTT app that have begun life as a normal fixed or mobile telephone call--could reduce carrier revenues as much as 30 percent, argues Andy Gent, Revector CEO.

OTT bypass affects carrier revenue because the bypass shifts call termination revenue away from telcos and to app providers.

“In the past month we have detected OTT Bypass across the globe with several operators reporting a reduction in termination call revenues of 25 percent, month on month,” said Gent.

“We have seen calls that have been made from one mobile phone number directly to another be received on a Viber app across three different continents and more than 15 network operators and national telecommunications regulators have contacted us regarding this issue in the past two weeks,”Gent said.

In the longer term, IDC expects server market growth to be driven by software-defined, disaggregated systems and network edge-deployed Internet of Things (IoT) compute," said Kuba Stolarski, research director, Computing Platforms at IDC.

By 2019, more than four-fifths (86 percent) of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; 14 percent will be processed by traditional data centers. Much of that traffic will remain in single in metro areas, rather than crossing the wide area network.

Traffic between data centers is growing faster than either traffic to end-users or traffic within the data center, and by 2018,  traffic between data centers will account for almost nine percent of total data center traffic, up from nearly seven percent at the end of 2013, according to Cisco.

The portion of traffic residing within the data center will decline slightly between 2014 and 2019, accounting for 75.5 percent of data center traffic in 2014 and about 73 percent by 2019, Cisco predicts.

Global Data Center Traffic, 2014–2019
	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	CAGR 2014–2019
By Type (EB per Year)
Data center to user	613	760	946	1,185	1,495	1,886	25%
Data center to data center	234	321	432	564	723	905	31%
Within data center	2,602	3,342	4,233	5,235	6,358	7,566	24%
By Segment (EB per Year)
Consumer	2,103	2,758	3,550	4,444	5,599	6,885	27%
Business	1,346	1,665	2,061	2,540	2,977	3,472	21%
By Type (EB per Year)
Cloud data center	2,110	2,956	4,017	5,328	6,854	8,622	33%
Traditional data center	1,339	1,467	1,594	1,656	1,722	1,735	5%
Total (EB per Year)
Total data center traffic	3,449	4,423	5,611	6,984	8,576	10,357	25%

source: Cisco

source: Cisco