Where is my SharePoint Online data centre?

Following on from Mick McGuinness’ excellent article on Keeping intranet home pages lean  I thought it would be interesting to see where those intranet home pages were being served from, in particular SharePoint Online home pages. We are seeing an increasing number of our customers moving to SharePoint Online. One of the big challenges is making sure that users are getting as least as good performance as they did in the on-premises days.

For this study, I chose around 25 domains, all of the form my-company.sharepoint.com. There were a mixture of production and test sites, large and small companies. Most were UK-centric companies, with users around Europe. The reason for choosing UK companies will become clearer later. Although the content of each company’s home page is different, they do all have a home page and it is retrieved more frequently than any other page. Therefore it makes for a reasonable benchmark. It also gives us enough data to draw some reasonable conclusions.

The screenshot below shows the results in WebTuna for all the home pages (/Pages/Home.aspx) in Europe on 13 February 2017. The over-time profile follows the pattern of a typical working day, with lots of users opening their browsers at 8am and 9am, and fetching the home page. At the bottom, the countries are ranked by the number of requests (see the little down-arrow next to Requests). We can see that users in the UK made more than 10 times the number of the next country, France.

You might hope that since most users are in the UK, they would have the fastest response time. After all, more man-hours will be lost in the UK if the pages are slow. But you would be disappointed. The screenshot below shows the same data ranked by response time (see the little up-arrow next to Avg Response Time). We find the UK and France languishing in 17th and 18th places respectively. This is beginning to look like the voting in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Source: o365datacentermap.azurewebsites.net

In September 2016, Microsoft announced two new UK data centres. See https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/07/office-365-local-datacenters-now-available-in-the-united-kingdom/ for example.