Tsunami of data set to make big waves by 2015

Mobile data consumption to hit a whopping 107 exacybytes.

Speaking at the NetEvents Thailand held on Feb 20-21, Open Networking Foundation managing director Rick Bauer said that currently there are over 5 billion mobile users worldwide but CISCO is now telling us that by 2015 there will be over 15 billion mobile devices, IP-based mobile devices that will be wanting to be managed and integrated.

Bauer noted that 60% of the traffic is real-time streaming media in the mobile environment and that's expected to grow.

Citing a study from the ABI Research, Bauer said that monthly mobile data use is expected to jump eight-fold in the next five years. “By 2015 traffic volume will have grown by more than 50% annually with the world consuming a whopping 107 exabytes -- not terabytes or petabytes, but exabytes of data just through mobile networks.

How are enterprises coping to still deliver a quality of service for consumers?

According to Bauer, there is a wave of change that is breaking over the networking industry and forcing everybody to look at a new kind of paradigm - the Software Defined Networking.

Bauer narrates that just a few years ago there was enough data transferred on networks to fill a stack of DVDs as tall as the moon and back and everybody has thought that data explosion was significant in 2010. But by 2020, many now think that stack of DVDs will turn into Blu-rays and it will grow 44 times, he adds.

“We're drowning in data. We've called it Big Data and we're trying to make sense of it.”

Bauer warns that the phenomenal exponential growth of data is causing networks to struggle to be able to continue and make sense and route and secure and manage with decreasing headcount and increasing deployment.

Bauer also said that one of the second major trends that's influencing people looking at SDN is cloud computing which is fuelled by the growth of private hybrid and public clouds.

Bauer noted that the public cloud services market is forecasted to grow by 19.6% YoY with a total revenue of over $109 billion.

According to Gartner, that will grow by another $10 billion by 2016.

"There's no hard and fast definition of hyperscale, but the ability to provision and manage large farms of IT infrastructure quickly with great reliability, is becoming one of the characteristics of nimble, agile and successful cloud enterprises.” 

Bauer explained that when an enterprise have new deployments starting with 20,000 servers in a server farm, it can no longer have the luxury of having custom interconnects between certain types of servers and other types of servers and changing service delivery by re-architecting and putting in new network interface cards and new management schemes, all of which are locked into the silicon of that particular interface card. The intelligence, he said, has to move into a more abstract layer that can be managed on a large scale.

“When you've got hundreds of thousands of servers, now that you've virtualized that environment you can no longer be at the mercy of a hardware interconnect at the L2 and L3 layers,” he said.

According to Bauer, another trend influencing enterprises to look into SDN is the growing demand for information which causes consumers, businesses and government to require fast access to new services. This, he said, is never more apparent than in the telecoms industry where time of delivery and time to delivery services are compressing.

“What was a six month project, is now becoming quickly a two and three month deployment window. Being characterised by success and failure within weeks is going to distinguish some telecoms as successful and others as laggards in the area, he said.”