After what seems like forever, Microsoft have finally lit up Office 365 in a couple of Aussie datacentres. First announced in December, Microsoft committed to a March 2015 release. Well, it’s March still…just. While reasons abound to want to have your tenant located on our glorious, metadata-retaining shores, the proof is, as they say, in the pudding. I spun up a demo tenant this morning after the announcement, and after testing my new tenant’s SharePoint site, the performance gains (as far as latency goes) are quite impressive. From my (awful) Wi-Fi connection at the Office 365 Summit in Sydney, I fired off a traceroute to make sure my new tenant was, in fact, in Australia:
Tenant Provisioned March 31, 2015
C:\>tracert xxx.sharepoint.com
Tracing route to prodnet324-328ipv4a0002.sharepointonline.com.akadns.net [104.146.164.27]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 45 ms 194 ms 74 ms 10.177.128.1
2 14 ms 17 ms 7 ms sonartech2.tmx.com.au [203.9.152.1]
3 91 ms 133 ms 266 ms 203.9.248.229
4 513 ms 243 ms 157 ms 4826.**syd**.equinix.com [202.167.228.74]
5 286 ms 189 ms 147 ms ten-0-2-0-0.cor03.**syd**03.nsw.VOCUS.net.au [114.31.192.42]
6 495 ms 137 ms 66 ms bundle-100.bdr04.**syd**03.nsw.VOCUS.net.au [114.31.192.45]
7 11 ms 27 ms 8 ms as12076.cust.bdr02.**syd**03.nsw.VOCUS.net.au [114.31.200.14]
8 208 ms 104 ms 304 ms ae7-0.**syd**-96cbe-1b.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.84.171]
9 180 ms 125 ms 276 ms xe-1-2-2-0.**mel**01-96cbe-1b.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.81.59]
10 232 ms 33 ms 26 ms ae0-0.**mel**01-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.80.56]
11 * * * Request timed out.
This trace wraps up in what can be reasonably inferred to be Melbourne. I’d be pretty comfortable suggesting that this tenant lives in Microsoft’s Melbourne datacentre.
Tenant Provisioned Late 2014
C:\>tracert xxx.sharepoint.com
Tracing route to prodnet26-28ipv4a0000.sharepointonline.com.akadns.net [191.234.222.41]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 265 ms 43 ms 10 ms 10.177.128.1
2 10 ms 8 ms 21 ms sonartech2.tmx.com.au [203.9.152.1]
3 741 ms 221 ms 276 ms 203.9.248.229
4 141 ms 136 ms 188 ms 4826.**syd**.equinix.com [202.167.228.74]
5 60 ms 90 ms 39 ms ten-0-2-1-6.cor03.**syd**03.nsw.VOCUS.net.au [114.31.192.52]
6 29 ms 34 ms 12 ms bundle-100.bdr04.**syd**03.nsw.VOCUS.net.au [114.31.192.45]
7 35 ms 23 ms 24 ms as12076.cust.bdr02.**syd**03.nsw.VOCUS.net.au [114.31.200.14]
8 116 ms 78 ms 214 ms ae7-0.**syd**-96cbe-1b.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.84.171]
9 140 ms 49 ms 23 ms 191.234.85.71
10 203 ms 168 ms 55 ms ae0-0.**mel**01-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.80.56]
11 365 ms 79 ms 69 ms xe-7-0-0-0.**per**01-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.81.30]
12 230 ms 209 ms 122 ms xe-2-1-3-100.**sge**-96cbe-1a.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.82.189]
13 265 ms 282 ms 268 ms ae0-0.**sge**-96cbe-1b.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.38.76]
14 191 ms 477 ms 193 ms ae1-0.**sg**2-96cbe-1b.ntwk.msn.net [191.234.80.147]
15 * * * Request timed out.
As compared to the trace above, this trace bounces through what I infer to be Perth and then Singapore. I don’t know how your geography is, but Melbourne is significantly closer to my Sydney location than Singapore (even via Perth) is:
In addition to this, there is a significant latency benefit to these local servers. I haven’t had a chance to performance test mail or SharePoint or anything like that yet, but even those last-hop pings are quite impressive - around 200ms in Singapore, and around 30 for the Melbourne hosts. This will likely make a lot of online-mode Outlook users very happy. Massive congratulations to Microsoft on (finally) getting this launched, I know it’ll make a lot of prospective Australian customers quite happy. As for tenant moves - I’m advised that this will be happening to tenants that have “Australia” set as their location, with a six week warning being sent to the tenant administrator. As to whether there will be an opt-out for this or not, I’m not sure.
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