Data center and consumer end user data usage are virtually mirror images of each other: most end user data consumption involves remote server access, while most data center data consumption is based on other local servers. In other words, consumer data usage now is WAN centric, while data center demand is LAN centric.
How those patterns might change once edge computing becomes ubiquitous is not yet clear. By definition, more computing and server access will come from a local source (on the premises or within a metro area) rather than from a remote data center.
Computation-focused operations (image analysis, virtual reality, augmented reality) will still rely on external server access, only those servers will be closer to the end user.
Many other content-related operations will rely on the existing metro data center architecture (content delivery networks), while highly-customized operations relying on large data stores will still happen msotly remotely.
The huge amount of “within the data center traffic” is partly caused by applications that involve lots of queries. Many internet applications are extremely “chatty”. A single search query within the data center might involve hundreds of server requests, for example.
A social networking transaction has a similar multiplier effect, as it draws in an entire social graph to respond to a single query.
The architecture of data centers can contribute to the amount of traffic as well, using with separate storage arrays, development or production server pods and application server clusters that all need to talk to one another.
Data center traffic moving to end users was a decade ago a larger percentage of total wide area network data volume. That has been steadily changing, with more traffic moving between data center locations.
In 2021, the volume of data moving between data centers is about equal to the amount of data moving to end users. Content caching accounts for some of the data center to data center increase. Content mirroring accounts for an additional amount of inter-data-center traffic.
Still, wide area network bandwidth now is about equally composed of traffic heading for end users and traffic moving between data centers, a trend itself driven by the dominance of content as a driver of network capacity.
Content drives as much as 83 percent of transAtlantic traffic and 66 percent of transPacific traffic, for example.
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