SOLVED: Performance Differences Between Azure Storage Data Centers Sites

If you are considering using Azure Storage via Azure File Sync or Azure File Share, you need to know how fast files transfer.  To figure this out we setup Azure storage shares in Toronto, San Antonio, California and Ireland than ran some tests.

Specifically, we used Azure File Sync which moves ALL of the files to the Microsoft Azure cloud but lets you cache files on your local servers to dramatically increase performance of your commonly used files.  We then let the sync take place overnight so all of the files were moved from our on-prem servers to the cloud and then we used Azure File Share to map a drive directly to the Azure storage.  This completely eliminated our local servers for the purpose of this test.

The simple explanation is, distance makes a difference.  This should not come as a surprise.

In the data below we are connecting from offices with at least 200Mb full duplex connections, mostly tested during normal business hours:

You can see the clear winner for single data center connection is San Antonio (South Center US) to Houston with an amazing 40MB/s.  However, London is the overall winner with fast connections to all three data centers we tested.