This is a quick post which illustrates the benefit of doing data transfers within a Azure Data Center. Instead of downloading files multiple times across each of my Azure VM’s, I created a secure FTP server on one of my VM’s. I then upload my files to this server and then share the contents.

Today I needed to get a file I had already uploaded, but the VM was in a different virtual network (this VM is designed to be isolated due to security concerns), so I decided to use an FTP client to download the file from my secure FTP server. It was during this operation that I noticed the file transfer speeds and decided to share.

Between VM’s (Same Data Center)

Between VM and On Premise

In addition to being faster, you also incur no bandwidth charges for data transfers within the same Data Center. While I’m using a windows VM which belongs to my domain I have running on Azure, you could accomplish the same task, at a slightly cheaper cost by setting up a Linux VM to host the FTP server.