Office 365 - What performance like in NZ?

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AndyR

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#119573 6-Jun-2013 12:44

Hi all,
I currently work for a large multinational company who just happen to have one of there satellite offices based in Auckland. Previously each office has done there own thing IT wise (I am the NZ Sys Admin) but recently our head office has announced they are pushing ahead with Office 365 for every office, including NZ.
Now I've never used O365 but heard bad things from colleges back in the UK and here in NZ regarding poor performance etc.
Our office has 70 people and we have onsite AD & Exchange servers, and we have a 10mb up & down Internet connection unlimited data with TelstraClear. Whats the performance like for Exchange being fully on O365 and then end users running in cached mode? I guess I'm just concerned that our 10mb link isn't going to cut it, esp as this is used for everything internet access wise, included branch office VPNs to our other offices around the world.
Thanks,
Andy

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#831559 6-Jun-2013 13:02

Once the mailboxes are synchronised (cached mode) there isn't much traffic really - it will come down to how many new emails are flowing and how many people are in the office at any time.

If you have a limited 10 Mbps link and ALL your Internet traffic goes through it then at some point something will slowdown. That is not a result of Office 365 "performance", but the result of using more of the link's available bandwidth.

If you are limited in terms of bandwidth then any other cloud-based service (Office 365, Google Mail) would end up having the same "performance" problem.

If you have 70 people in the office I think it's about time to investigate things like a better/bigger bandwidth service, network infrastructure, etc.

AndyR

73 posts

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#831571 6-Jun-2013 13:08

If you have 70 people in the office I think it's about time to investigate things like a better/bigger bandwidth service, network infrastructure, etc.

Thanks, yeah thats my thoughts exactly too. Have been trying to get better/bigger bandwidth for a while now but have never been able to justify the expense, but with O365 coming our way I think this might be the kicker which gets them to approve it.

Mail traffic isn't actually that high here, we have a large number of small emails (alerts) which come in each day for users but large size emails are not that heavy.

What about Lync? Any experience of that as thats one area I have zero knowledge.

gehenna

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#831572 6-Jun-2013 13:09

Speed of the service is mainly measured in terms of latency, being the time it takes for data requests to get from here to the server, and back. From memory the best that can be achieved right now is about 200-250ms based purely on the distance from NZ to the servers in Singapore. I believe Microsoft are working on some routing arrangements to try and reduce that to the sub-200ms mark.

In real world terms this is where you'll notice delays - when opening or saving files on the server that aren't cached (i.e. SharePoint Online files or email attachments). As freitasm says once your email is cached locally you won't notice any issues in that regard at all - except those other points he's raised.

Do you intend to use SharePoint Online and Lync Online as well? Or just Exchange Online?

AndyR

73 posts

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#831574 6-Jun-2013 13:11

Do you intend to use SharePoint Online and Lync Online as well? Or just Exchange Online?

In the initial phase I think they are just looking at SharePoint and Exchange, but the next phase would definitely be using Lync for internal IM. Have no experience of Lync though.

Thanks for the latency figures. I'd read about the singapore/o365 details but could never find figures to back it up.

gehenna

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#831576 6-Jun-2013 13:13

Those figures are just from memory, don't quote me :)

You'll probably find setting up Exchange and Lync would be the best bet initially, since they're both simple to get working.

SharePoint will require some more planning. But "out of the box" you can start using Exchange and Lync as soon as your DNS is set up and your apps are installed.

mrdrifter

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#831621 6-Jun-2013 14:32

As the others have mentioned, email shouldn't be an issue after initial setup, ourselves and a number of clients are running their email from Office 365 with no problems so far.

Generally for Lync you won't notice any issues day to day. The only issues we have with Lync are related to Lync meetings. This is due to the way Lync meetings are hosted on the server, so all attendees are connected back to the datacentre. When making point to point/ad-hoc Lync calls, these only use the server for signalling and connections are then client to client.

SharePoint you will notice slow downs when opening and/or saving large files from your client to SharePoint as the data is sitting a long way from NZ. We build our O365 SharePoint document solutions to make the most out of tools such as SkyDrive Pro or other sync tools so they can work with a local cache with their most used files. - This problem doesn't occur if viewing/editing in the browser

In relation to the 'slowness' of Office 365 we did testing of various Cloud Services including, Office 365 (2010), Office 365 (2013), box, dropbox, google drive, skydrive. (this was at the time the main Office 365 route was down to Singapore) -
The actual time differences between the services
For a 10 MB document download was less than 3 seconds on average. (except consumer skydrive - which was 3x slower)
Upload times were within 10 seconds of each other, (except Dropbox and consumer Skydrive being 2x slower)

In reality, most of these delays are never noticed and the major services are all very similar, but if moving from a local file share, there is some expectation management required.

AndyR

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#831641 6-Jun-2013 14:46

Thanks guys, really good replies.

I think the push for SharePoint is mainly for documents that need to be shared between the companies as at present we have several AD domains, no trusts in place and slow links between networks anyway making collaboration on files a pain. We will still be keeping a local file share for the larger files we have which do not need to be shared, still have to work out all the details on that anyway.

Interesting on Lync, i thought it all went via the server, wasn't aware that for point to point/ad hoc the server is only used for the initial connection, thats good. Meetings all going back to the DC might not be a huge issue, we currently use WebEx for meetings and I think that does the same with everything going via a central DC.

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mrdrifter

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#831644 6-Jun-2013 14:57

The local file server still has a place for the large files locally, our clients utilizing CAD files etc... are still a while away from being able to benefit from the advantages of online services.

Lync works very well in most cases, but the double hop with Lync meetings gets to be such a pain at times that we actually phone in to calls with Microsoft themselves for voice, and use Lync for the screen sharing (which works really well).
I hope to see some of the Lync video codecs incorporated into Skype over time, as the Lync codecs are far superior.

paulb001

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#832255 7-Jun-2013 12:25

Hi all, we have been working on enhancements for some time across Product, Datacentre and network, and this is an ongoing work stream across many parts of Microsoft - most recently we have put a point of presence into Auckland that allows ISP's to peer with us and route Microsoft destined traffic onto our network and we carry it to our regional datacentres via Sydney/Perth. Most customers should be well below 180ms these days and depending on whom your ISP is and their upstream provider you will be between 120-150ms Microsoft.

As others have noted you won't really notice any performance issues with Exchange, however large doc up/downloading to SharePoint.com will take a little longer than having a local file server of course - this is because it is done in real-time rather than using intermediary caching servers, plus it’s impacted by general open internet capacity. Customers with business grade fast connections and capacity are not impacted significantly.

We continue to work to optimise our online services from a network, datacentre and product perspective, and you will see us continuously evolve the offering, such as the new releases we made in March around the backend servers (bringing them up to v2013), new front end features, and new plans as well, e.g: http://office.microsoft.com/en-nz/business/ - this also introduced a new html5 OWA client which allows you to work on multiple emails at the same time and, for instance, attach a file to an email and keep working on other mails at the same time while it uploads/attach’s itself.

Some of you will have no doubt seen our recent announcement about putting an Azure Datacentre into Australia and we will continue to evaluate this as well for Office365, Windows Intune and CRM Online and other online services that we are bringing to market.

When you compare the cost to benefit ratio, the sheer breadth of features and capability across the Office365 suite, the SLA, ROI and savings from managing servers et al, plus the fully integrated nature of Exch/SP/Lync working together its pretty hard to justify local instances and hence why we are see such massive uptake around the world from both SMB but also enterprise customers.

We genuinely value customer feedback and we are welcome working with any customers on improving the service. If you are experiencing any service issues, please always log them with our support team first via: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/Support/ServiceRequests.aspx

If you aren’t getting any response, or need to speak with us locally, you can reach myself and my team via nzcloud@microsoft.com

Ps. You can also test Exchange connectivity via https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

Regards
Paul Bowkett
Microsoft New Zealand

Paul Bowkett
Microsoft New Zealand
http://microsoft365.com
http://twitter.com/paulbowkett
http://linkedin.com/in/paulbowkett

graemeh

2078 posts

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#832302 7-Jun-2013 14:16

You can sign up for a free one month trial of Office 365 Enterprise, this includes SharePoint.

I've been using it for a few days now and while I haven't used it heavily (yet) I've been impressed with the performance, even over a 3G mobile connection.

Regs

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Snowflake

#832348 7-Jun-2013 16:59

AndyR:

If you have 70 people in the office I think it's about time to investigate things like a better/bigger bandwidth service, network infrastructure, etc.

Thanks, yeah thats my thoughts exactly too. Have been trying to get better/bigger bandwidth for a while now but have never been able to justify the expense, but with O365 coming our way I think this might be the kicker which gets them to approve it.

if you're on a fibre connection already, then you should easily be able to get a bigger pipe - typically with just a config change. If telstraclear dont give you a good price for a fatter pipe then talk to another ISP. I used to have a telstra fibre connection with CallPlus as the ISP and that was a lot better priced that using telstracear as the ISP. I believe that Orcon and others can also use telstraclear, telecom and vector fibre connections.

Callplus does route via the new Microsoft Peering Point at APE so your latency to singapore will be in the 120ms range and performance should be decent.

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thefunkysoulone

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#832677 8-Jun-2013 14:47

graemeh: You can sign up for a free one month trial of Office 365 Enterprise, this includes SharePoint
.

I did this and thought it was that good I signed up a week later to the full service.

However, the original trial domain is still in the system and you cant remove it. I have followed all of the guidance and switched domains over and everything is working as it should be except my public site. Something is not working with the sharepoint system and when I try to go to my public site it keeps flipping out and redirecting to the trial domain (that has no site), it has a bit more of fit and then I end up being logged out.

I am sure it has something to do with the trial account and apparently at the end of the trial all traces of this gets automatically so should resolve it. However having no external facing site for a month isn't any good.

I have logged a service request and waiting for them to get back to me.

mrdrifter

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#832679 8-Jun-2013 15:03

thefunkysoulone: However, the original trial domain is still in the system and you cant remove it. I have followed all of the guidance and switched domains over and everything is working as it should be except my public site. Something is not working with the sharepoint system and when I try to go to my public site it keeps flipping out and redirecting to the trial domain (that has no site), it has a bit more of fit and then I end up being logged out.

I am sure it has something to do with the trial account and apparently at the end of the trial all traces of this gets automatically so should resolve it. However having no external facing site for a month isn't any good.

I have logged a service request and waiting for them to get back to me.

If you would like me to take a look I can as we are a Microsoft Cloud Partner and spend most of our time with Office 365 and SharePoint. Let me know via PM if you want e to investigate.

CYaBro

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#832705 8-Jun-2013 15:55

thefunkysoulone:
graemeh: You can sign up for a free one month trial of Office 365 Enterprise, this includes SharePoint
.

I did this and thought it was that good I signed up a week later to the full service.

However, the original trial domain is still in the system and you cant remove it. I have followed all of the guidance and switched domains over and everything is working as it should be except my public site. Something is not working with the sharepoint system and when I try to go to my public site it keeps flipping out and redirecting to the trial domain (that has no site), it has a bit more of fit and then I end up being logged out.

I am sure it has something to do with the trial account and apparently at the end of the trial all traces of this gets automatically so should resolve it. However having no external facing site for a month isn't any good.

I have logged a service request and waiting for them to get back to me.

When you say 'trial domain' do you mean the @????.onmicrosoft.com domain?
That stays there permanently, don't think there is anyway to remove it.
What will get deleted is the actual Office 365 trial plan you started, if you have paid for a different plan now.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

compost

295 posts

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#832748 8-Jun-2013 18:30

AndyR: Hi all,
I currently work for a large multinational company who just happen to have one of there satellite offices based in Auckland. Previously each office has done there own thing IT wise (I am the NZ Sys Admin) but recently our head office has announced they are pushing ahead with Office 365 for every office, including NZ.
Now I've never used O365 but heard bad things from colleges back in the UK and here in NZ regarding poor performance etc.
Our office has 70 people and we have onsite AD & Exchange servers, and we have a 10mb up & down Internet connection unlimited data with TelstraClear. Whats the performance like for Exchange being fully on O365 and then end users running in cached mode? I guess I'm just concerned that our 10mb link isn't going to cut it, esp as this is used for everything internet access wise, included branch office VPNs to our other offices around the world.
Thanks,
Andy

No local servers = no local staff to admin them. Assert that you can't get any more bandwidth in this backward part of the world and get an exception for NZ. Better to be inefficient than unemployed

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