Tuesday, November 16, 2021

"Data Center to Data Center" Traffic Drive About Half of WAN Demand

Data center traffic moving to end users was a decade ago a larger percentage of total wide area network data volume. That has been steadily changing, with more traffic moving between data center locations.  


In 2021, the volume of data moving between data centers is about equal to the amount of data moving to end users. Content caching accounts for some of the data center to data center increase. Content mirroring accounts for an additional amount of inter-data-center traffic. 

source: Cisco 


The huge amount of “within the data center traffic” is partly caused by applications that involve lots of queries. Many internet applications are extremely “chatty”. A single search query within the data center might involve hundreds of server requests, for example. 


A social networking transaction has a similar multiplier effect, as it draws in an entire social graph to respond to a single query. 


The architecture of data centers can contribute to the amount of traffic as well, using with separate storage arrays, development or  production server pods and application server clusters that all need to talk to one another.


Still, wide area network bandwidth now is about equally composed of traffic heading for end users and traffic moving between data centers, a trend itself driven by the dominance of content as a driver of network capacity. 

source: Telegeography 


Content drives as much as 83 percent of transAtlantic traffic and 66 percent of transPacific traffic, for example. 

source: Telegeography

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