HP Innovation Journal Issue 12: Summer 2019 | Page 59
ENERGY COST OF 2025 DATA MOVEMENT
FROM EDGE DEVICES IS UNSUSTAINABLE
Edge Data Explosion Requires New Compute Model to Limit Transmission Cost
Annual Data Generation (ZB)
163
154
Trapped Data
126
Available IP Bandwidth
1 Zettabyte = 1,024 Exabyte
1 Exabyte = 1,024 Petabytes
97
75
58
35
27
25
2
2018
33
2
2019
45
3 3 4 5 7 8
2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
ENERGY COST OF
2025 DATA MOVEMENT
~5kWh and $0.51 of energy for each GB transmitted
By reference—
in 2017 the
world produced
71
42
The industry can’t just keep building out network capac-
ity; it is limited by the energy and economic cost of
bandwidth. Using a 2012 estimate of the cost of moving a
gigabyte of data from the edge to the cloud, bandwidth to
move the full 163ZB in 2025 of edge-captured data would
cost $92 trillion and require 835 petawatt hours of elec-
tricity. This equates to 122% of global GDP ($75 trillion)
and 33 times the global electricity generated in 2016.
$92T
92
55
Over 95% of the data captured at the edge by these devices
will remain where it is, typically far from a cloud data
center. By 2025, the gap between data transmission capac-
ity (8 zettabytes [ZB]) and data generated at the edge
(163ZB) will rise to 154ZB.
Extrapolated cost
to transmit 2025
generated data
119
835
PetaWhr
Electricity
$81T 26
GDP PetaWhr
Electricity
TRADITIONAL CLOUD
BREAKS TRYING TO MANAGE
DATA CENTRALLY
Industry is Struggling to Meet
this Local Data Analytics Challenge
“Using conventional means of transferring
data, it will take you 26 years to move
an exabyte to the cloud.”
—Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS
Pratt & Whitney uses 5,000 sensors
producing 10GB of data per second
to achieve a 16% fuel efficiency
improvement and a 75% reduction in noise.
Amazon uses a semi-trailer truck to move
100 petabytes of data to its cloud.
EQUIVALENT TO 25 MINUTES
OF DATA FROM PRATT & WHITNEY
TURBOFAN FLEET
Moving 163 zettabytes of 2025 data
would take either 4.2 million years
or 1.6 million semi-trailer trucks.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-truck-
hauling-huge-hard-drive/
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