OneDrive for Business FAQ from the field (July 2015)

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I have been getting a lot of questions recently about OneDrive for Business from the field. Therefore I thought it would be a good idea to share my findings from the field to the field.

Q: When is Unlimited Storage coming to OneDrive for Business?

A: Unlimited storage is currently in the development phase. It is scheduled to be deployed to customers in first release around the end of Calendar year 2015. For more information refer to:

Q: OneDrive for Business Storage is this available in multiple data centres across the globe?

A:  t this point in time there is no information as to whether this feature will be coming to Office 365. The data held in Office 365 cannot be stored on a CDN as the data is protected by security controls unlike data that is usually hosted in Content Distribution Networks (CDN). The SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business data is stored at the data centre where the tenant is hosted e.g. Dublin or Amsterdam for a tenant hosted in Western Europe.

The current published capabilities for global organisations using SharePoint Online is for regional tenants e.g. users in Western Europe will consume from Western Europe Data Centres, users in Asia will consume from Asian Data Centres. This will help  ensure data access is quicker and smoother for users in the region. It also helps customers in sectors such as financial services, healthcare and central and local government better comply with regulations for data that needs to be stored in specific locations.

However when dealing with OneDrive for Business we still may have connectivity issues, when users in the North America (data stored in North America) share their documents with users in Asia using OneDrive for Business. The document accessed from the user in Asia will still require the document to travel over the internet from North American data centre to the user. This may cause performance issues. 

Q: How to optimize connectivity to OneDrive for Business?

A: When it comes to OneDrive for Business the current recommendation is to follow guidelines for SharePoint Online  tuning and Optimization.

 Tune SharePoint Online performance  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn850362.aspx#TuneSharePoint