Hyperscale data centers will grow from 259 at the end of 2015 to 485 by 2020, according to the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index.
The study identified 24 hyperscale data center operators, based on whether they met certain revenue benchmarks in cloud services. Their facilities will represent 47 percent of all installed data center servers by 2020.
Hyperscale refers to the use of nodes to add compute, memory, networking, and storage to dynamically scale for increased demand.
The Cisco report says traffic within hyperscale data centers will quintuple by 2020. These facilities already account for 34 percent of total traffic within all data centers and will account for 53 percent by 2020.
Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are helping to flatten data center architectures and streamline traffic flows, and hyperscale data centers are taking advantage of these technologies. Over the next five years, nearly 60 percent of global hyperscale data centers are expected to deploy SDN or NFV software, says the report.
And by 2020, 44 percent of traffic within data centers will be supported by SDN/NFV platforms (up from 23 percent in 2015).
Other findings from the Cisco report include:
- By 2020, 92 percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers, while only 8 percent of workloads will be processed by traditional data centers (which rely on a concrete location).
- Workload density (workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 7.3 in 2015 and will grow to 11.9 by 2020. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.2 in 2015 and will grow modestly to 3.5 by 2020.
- Public cloud is growing faster than private cloud growth. By 2020, 68 percent (298 million) of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 49 percent (66.3 million) in 2015. By 2020, 32 percent (142 million) of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centers, down from 51 percent (69.7 million) in 2015 (15 percent CAGR 2015-2020).