When hosting a solution on Windows Azure, you can choose between multiple data centers around the world. Do you want to get an indication which data center gives you the highest throughput?
The Microsoft Research eXtreme Computing Group cloud-research engagement team released a desktop utility that measures the upload and download throughput achievable from your on-premise client machine to Azure cloud storage (blobs, tables and queue).
You simply install this tool on your on-premise machine, select a data center for the evaluation, and enter the account details of any storage service created within it. The utility will perform a series of data-upload and -download tests using sample data and collect measurements of throughput, which are displayed at the end of the test, along with other statistics.
Download the tool here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/5c8189b9-53aa-4d6a-a086-013d927e15a7/default.aspx