Forum Discussion
How does Microsoft distribute the data between all their data centers?
Hi,
I'm wondering how Microsoft decides to distribute the data between all of their data centers.
Reason why I'm asking this is because we are an international company with over 5500 mailboxes and sites all of the world.
However, all of our mailboxes are located in datacenters in Europe:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Austria
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Finland
We have, for instance, a lot of users in Singapore, India, South America, Australia, etc...
I imagine that the performance would be much better if the mailbox is actually stored in the region the user resides in.
On http://o365datacentermap.azurewebsites.net/ page you can find all the data centers.
I've used https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PowerShell-Script-to-a6bbfc2e script to determine the Exchange Online mailbox locations in our environment.
Thanks for your input.
- At the moment tenants are homed in a region, in your case this would seem to be Emea, and those are the data centres. My tenant is in Dublin and Amsterdam. I doubt it makes much performance difference, it's more about regulatory requirements.
7 Replies
- At the moment tenants are homed in a region, in your case this would seem to be Emea, and those are the data centres. My tenant is in Dublin and Amsterdam. I doubt it makes much performance difference, it's more about regulatory requirements.
- This makes sense.
However, I am confident that there would be better performance if, for instance, users from Singapore have to connect to the servers in Singapore instead of the ones in EMEA.
Thanks!- Microsoft's network connects to the internet in many locations, you won't come all the way round the internet to get to an EU DC, you'll pick up their wan somewhere more local. Once you get on to it then you get a pretty standard level of performance. Remember that there is a CDN that is replicating those core files like sharepoint scripts and applications like Outlook work entirely cached these days, no user response is waiting on servers.
Most latency comes from local network, local ISPs and their peering arrangement, the physics of distance make little effect. Nothing on earth is more than 20,000Km away, light in fibre can do that in less than 0.1seconds.
