Cloudy days ahead!

Everybody is talking about the cloud.  Most of the chatter is about how it is changing the way we interact with data and our electronic devices.  But what those of us in the cabling industry want to know about is how the cloud can represent business opportunity. 

I had occasion to attend a presentation by Patrick McLaughlin, Chief Editor of Cabling Installation and Maintenance in Orlando last week.  Patrick shared some perspectives gleaned from Cisco’s “Cloud Index”    here is a link to a white paper that summarizes the data.http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns1175/Cloud_Index_White_Paper.html

I had many takeaways.  But here are a few as food for thought:

• Most internet traffic has shifted from peer to peer file sharing into traffic that originated or terminates in a data center.  Expect continued growth in datacenter cabling upgrades.
• Datacenter complexity will increase 5X in the next few years due to the multitude of paths for user content can now take.  Strategies for minimizing complexity in the datacenter will be a differentiator for those competing for the upgrades.
• Within a few years, up to one third of data center traffic will be related to the cloud. This is likely to drive greater storage, computing and cabling capacity in the datacenter.
• In the future, three quarters of the datacenter traffic will remain in the datacenter.  This will demand higher bandwidth cabling between racks and rows in the datacenters.  Look for copper 10GBASE-T, or 40Gig fiber deployments.