There seems to be no end in sight to the growth of data center traffic, with cloud traffic pushing that trend, according to a survey from Cisco.

The survey, called The Cisco Global Cloud Index, forecasts that all data center traffic growth is expected to quadruple between 2011 and 2016, from 1.8 zettabytes in 2011 to 6.6 zettabytes in 2016.

Cloud traffic will be the fastest growing segment of this growth, burgeoning from 39 percent of data center traffic at 683 exabytes in 2011 to 64 percent of data center traffic at 4.3 exabytes in 2016.

[Related: 7 Ways The Cloud Is Changing The Data Center]

The trend is repeated with the growth of cloud server workloads in the data center.

In 2011, 30 percent of server workloads were processed in the cloud, and 70 percent were handled in traditional data centers. By 2016, 62 percent of server workloads will be processed in the cloud.

Cisco has been using zettabytes as a term of measurement to describe the huge explosion of data traffic on networks. The networking company says 1.3 zettabytes equals a trillion gigabytes.

The survey also found that in 2011, North America generated the most cloud traffic at 261 exabytes, followed by Asia Pacific at 216 exabytes annually and Western Europe with 156 exabytes annually.

By 2016, cloud traffic from the Asia Pacific region will generate 1.5 zettabytes annually, surpassing North America at 1.1 zettabytes annually and Western Europe at 963 exabytes annually.

The Middle East and Africa will have the highest cloud traffic growth rates at 79 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), followed by Latin America at 66 percent CAGR, Central and Eastern Europe at 55 percent CAGR and North America, at a CAGR of 34 percent.

PUBLISHED OCT. 24, 2012