Ow. That's going to affect the bottom line of a bunch of European companies.

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NEW - in France, OVH,one of Europe's largest data center complexes, was destroyed by fire. An estimated 3.6 million websites are offline, no data is likely to be recoverable.



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Fire Has Destroyed OVH’s Strasbourg Data Center (SBG2)

No OVH, firefighting, or local government services staff members were injured, the company said. Restart of surviving data centers on campus not anticipated until Monday.

Yevgeniy Sverdlik | Mar 10, 2021

A fire early Wednesday morning destroyed one of OVH’s Strasbourg data centers and part of a second one.

No OVH, firefighting, or local government services staff members were injured, the company, also known as OVHcloud, said.

Many customers of OVH, the largest Europe-native cloud provider, complained on Twitter about downed websites and applications hosted at the campus in Eastern France. Some appeared to not have disaster recovery plans or backup sites.

The cause of the fire had not been determined as of Wednesday morning US Pacific time.
...
The company said it did not anticipate restoring power to SBG1 and SBG4 until Monday the 15th and SBG3 until Friday the 19th.

Among cloud providers that aren’t the big three (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud), OVH is one of the more popular ones. Just two days ago the company said it had started the process for a potential public listing in Paris.
...
The fire broke out in one room inside SBG2 just before 1 am local time, according to the incident report. "Firefighters immediately intervened to protect our teams and prevent the spread of the fire. At 2:54 am they isolated the site and closed off its perimeter."

By around 4 am, SBG2 was destroyed completely, and the nearby data centers remained under threat until the firefighters eventually brought the fire under control.


PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP via Getty ImagesOVH SBG2 data center in Strasbourg destroyed by fire on March 10 2021

OVH said in a statement:

quote:

With our 15 data centers in Europe, our technical and commercial teams are fully invested to support our customers, implement solutions and mitigate the impact of the unavailability of our Strasbourg site. Our mission is to provide our customers with the highest quality of services to support their online activities and we know how important this is to them. We sincerely apologize for the difficulties and challenges caused by this fire. We are committed to continue to communicate with the greatest transparency about the cause of the fire and its consequences.

Most of OVH's 27 data centers are in Europe, with some in North America and Asia Pacific.

ROSAL

Would this company not been responsible to have off site back-up?

RMD

Yeah, maybe got a thumb drive and a couple of dual-density DVDs in a drawer somewhere?

One of a couple of reasons I don't trust my data to "the cloud".

Did we lose all the goat data?

Is this data center made of cargo containers????

... that's a lot of flammable data right there

So modern

so eco

so burn

At one point, I worked as Security for a GM Financial (GMAC then) data center. They took fire safety super seriously and had a sophisticated HVAC and fire suppression system to support the computers. Everything was fully alarmed and if I wanted to see people jump, all I had to do was contact the supervisor and say the word "overheating".

quote:

greatest transparency about the cause of the fire and its consequences.

Sounds like misdirection to me. I probably wouldn’t care about the cause so much as why the didn’t have any redundancy or disaster recovery in place.

Surprised that the data isn't recoverable--I thought data centers backed up to other data centers. Like a giant RAID 5.

My understanding was that if a data center went down, internet traffic could just route to another data center. It would be slow, but it would work?

quote:

Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:
Is this data center made of cargo containers????

That's what I was thinking from that first picture too. Looks like they stacked a bunch of shipping containers together.

It's hard to believe they don't back the data up somehow. Glad I put nothing on the cloud and do my own backups for anything I consider important.

Well, there is at least one shipping container in that picture and whatever is in there, looks like it is probably okay. I need to get one of those containers for my thumb drives maybe for sure.

So, who set the fire? To hide what? I'm always cynical when these kind of things happen.

quote:

Originally posted by WaterburyBob:
So, who set the fire? To hide what? I'm always cynical when these kind of things happen.

My guess too.

What data might have been there and who would benefit from its destruction?

maybe it's just simply part of the growing google cancel culture.

In other news, the European Onion stated the global warming crisis was exacerbated today when digital files equivalent to 6.022x10^23 pieces of A4 paper went up in flames. "The carbon equivalency of 6.022x10^23 pieces of A4 paper is equal to the combined coal reserves of Portugal and Sardinia."

Many that use cloud services, especially web hosting do not put stock in backing up their data. Hosting and data services companies typically do not by default backup data at data centers. They may offer it as a side service but to me it doesn’t pass my eggs in a basket test.

I prefer at a minimum a secondary backup method. As an example, it’s ironic that we moved to Office 365 hosted, great service but with the use of One Drive, SharePoint, Teams to share and store data as well as email services I now backup my cloud data to a local server as one of two backups we do, cloud to cloud being the second. The exact opposite of the old ways where you hosted and managed data on servers onsite then backed up to cloud. No problems for me because managing exchange email servers sucked, so it’s been a great trade off. Going to be a ton of resume generating events for this all around I suspect...

Anyone who's doing high level commercial hosting should have a everything mirrored to a hot backup sight NOT co-located. If the main sight goes up in flames (see above), swap the DNS entries and they're back in business. They'd then immediately stand up a third sight and get their servers mirrored to that.

Two is one and one is none also applies to IT.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BBMW,

Yet another one of those Euro buildings that appear to be clad in that flammable Styrofoam board shit