Windows Azure has introduced some new data centers in North America this spring. I wanted to know which was the best data center to host my Azure sites that are connecting to CRM Online. I couldn't get an answer out of any of my CRM MVP buddies or the CRM product team so I decided I would do a little testing on my own to determine what I should use as a strategy. I dediced to spin up a sample Azure website then RDP to the server and browse to the /tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx url of my CRM Online subscription to give me the raw performance numbers. This tool can be used with any CRM deployment and gives a few interesting performance numbers. There are two real important numbers that would affect performance of the Azure sites using CRM Online - latency and bandwidth. It is considered that CRM would need to be better than 150 ms of latency to be usable to an end user and it would require more than 50KB/s to be usable. Those assessments are for an end user browser not the SDK, but they do provide a guideline.
| Azure Data Center |
Latency |
Bandwidth |
| North Central US |
31 ms |
3.56 MB/s |
| South Central US |
46 ms |
478 KB/s |
| West US |
81 ms |
239 KB/s |
| East US |
8 ms |
24.92 MB/s |
It looks like the current CRM Online data center that is used to host my organization is very close to the new Azure East US data center. Notice that from a performance standpoint, there is a 1000% difference between the West US and East US data center. This demonstrates to me that it was well worth my effort to measure this and to consider this in my Azure deployments. Please note that these were a one-time test, all done at approximately the same time. The performance numbers may change over time, especially as CRM Online moves to the new DR data centers.
