The Evolution of the Data Center to the Cloud

Data centers are evolving from isolated resource “islands” to interconnected pools of virtualized resources shared between multiple data center locations — effectively creating “data centers without walls” that help businesses cut costs and maximize IT efficiency. Ciena has provided an overview of the evolution of the data center to the cloud.

Click through for an overview of the evolution of the data center to the cloud, as identified by Ciena.

The total amount of information stored today by all the businesses worldwide is 2.2 zettabytes. Information  is expected to grow 67 percent in 2013 for enterprises and 178 percent for SMBs.

Total investment in data center IT infrastructure will grow five percent on average per year to reach $152 billion in 2016.

Eighty-four percent of enterprises planned to add data center capacity due to the influx of new applications and efficiency constraints.

In 2008, only 12 percent of server workloads were virtualized. Sixty percent of workloads will be virtualized by 2014.

Unplanned data transfers could top 1TB, periodic transfers 10TB, and bulk tranfers 100TB.

To be more agile, businesses can move some of their virtual servers to the cloud and virtualize their data center resources. Now by pooling these virtual data center resources across multiple data centers, total resource requirements can be reduced by up to 35 percent.

Providing enterprise-class cloud services that can scale flexibly will result in lower costs for businesses than today’s isolated data centers.