The Cloud Computing Opportunity by the Numbers
— How big is the opportunity for cloud computing? A question asked at pretty well every IT conference these days. Whatever the number, it’s a big one. Let’s break down the opportunity by the numbers available today.
By 2011 Merrill Lynch says the cloud computing market will reach $160 billion.
The number of physical servers in the World today: 50 million.
By 2013, approximately 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized
By 2013 10 percent of the total number of physical servers sold will be virtualized with an average of 10 VM’s per physical server sold.
At 10 VMs per physical host that means about 80-100 million virtual machines are being created per year or 273,972 per day or 11,375 per hour.
50 percent of the 8 million servers sold every year end up in data centers, according to a BusinessWeek report
The data centers of the dot-com era consumed 1 or 2 megawatts. Today data center facilities require 20 megawatts are common, – 10 times as much as a decade ago.

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