Does a High Variation in Ping Response Times Indicate a Potential Network Issue?

Variance in ping times can be indicative of several things, but the fact that you get the same behaviour regardless of which server in that data centre you ping seems to indicate that there may be an issue with a link or device along the path.

It's worth doing repeated traceroutes to the sever(s) in question, to see if you can identify a particular network device where latency is varying; or alternatively, it could be that there are multiple paths to this location, one of which experiences generally higher latency.

Are you seeing any packet loss when you perform extended pings? If so, this may be indicative of a congested link.

Could you provide a bit more detail about the connectivity between your office and your data centres? Are you using leased lines? Internet VPN? Have you spoken to your company's NOC/network administrators? They may be aware of this issue already.

ping time can vary so much according to factors outside your control that it's worth aggregating results to eliminate inconsistencies - there is a useful linux tool called mtr which is included in many distributions and aggregates traceroute and ping into a single utility. It will give you the best and worst ping times, as well as average and standard deviation. While not conclusive, it will offer a more balanced view.

Possibly, but not certainly. How is your office linked to the data centers? Pings over a site to site VPN can vary quite a bit considering they travel over the internet.

Are you seeing any other performance problems or issues with the connection besides the pings? Those response times are still all under 100ms, which could just be normal for the new links you are on.

Just another thought, if one of the links you are going through is near full capacity, pings are usually given a lower priority, which could explain the variation.

But like others have said, there are so many factors at play, it could mean something but also it may not mean anything.

What does traceroute show? it will give you pings to each hop.

I typically see a lot of variation on wireless connections, which I consider normal.