OVH Datacenter Burndown: A Disaster for the Entire French Software Industry

It's inferno after Inferno for the top gear cloud computing company. There is before and after March 2021.

March 25, 2021, 11:06 a.m.

TL;DR

Last week, 7 pm on March 19 saw another fire plague on the data centers of OVHCloud, the second in just a fortnight. The fire broke out in the battery room before the quick intervention. Recuperations have been suspended.

Having caused devastation for one of OVH's four Strasbourg data centers then came an even bigger conflagration on March 19, 2021

Key Facts

1
More than 10,000 customers affected
2
Thousands of data said to be irrecoverable
3
The history of the fire remains unknown
4
Other factories and data centers have increased workload

Details

The conflagration in an OVH data center located in Strasbourg, France, certainly left more than a minor dent. It takes the French leader in cloud computing years back, an incident that the French industry would want to erase from history. This is more than a warning for every sector not to be flippant with security and tidiness.

Source: leparisien.fr

Having caused devastation for one of OVH's four Strasbourg data centers then came an even bigger conflagration on March 19, 2021. This has left the French cloud community and the entire world talking and even asking questions. Unarguably, OVH is reputed as the Fresh Champion of cloud infrastructure and is the only European cloud company capable of shrugging shoulders with American giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. The president and founder of Scaleway, the colocation and cloud hosting company of Xavier Niel's Iliad group, and owner of Free, Arnaud de Bermingham, told L'Usine Nouvelle,

There is before and after March 2021; this is a sad event for the entire French cloud. Nothing will ever be the same in our industry again.

Datacenter	Current Situation	Date of electrical activation	Server recovery timeframe
SBG-1	4 of 8 facilities razed - 50% possibility of recovering data	By March 19, 2021	Progressive by March 21, 2021
SBG-2	Absolutely destroyed	Unknown	Unknown
SBG-3	Offline but servers remain intact	By March 17, 2021	Progressive by March 25, 2021
SBG-4	Offline but servers remain intact	By March 19, 2021	Progressive by March 21, 2021

Imaging cameras of firefighters arriving at the scene 15 minutes after getting the first alert burning UPSs in SBG2, one of the interventions' subjects the same day SBG2 is based on tech dating back to 2011. SBG3, a 2016 generation, was saved by technology that prevented it from a conflagration.

We have a major incident on SBG2. The fire declared in the building. Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated which impacts all services in SGB1-4. We recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan.
— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 10, 2021

OVH reports claim it has increased the production rate of servers going from 2500 to 3000 servers daily to rehabilitate as many sites as possible within a considerable time. OVH specifics say that users who have opted for the FTP Backup hope for entire data recovery because the backups have been stored in another site. It's still speculation what the consequences of the incident will be for the French cloud host.

Update March,22 8pm
Here, the 3nd video with last updates about the fire in our DC in SBG2. pic.twitter.com/sMGrCz2X4I
— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 22, 2021

Retrospectively, there is a possibility that this incident ends up forgotten despite its weight, especially if necessary measures are taken by the OVH, as Octave Klaba, the CEO of the group, ascertained, to ensure these accidents never happen again. However, it is impossible to overlook the rise of Microsoft Azure, Amazon web services, and Google cloud in web hosting. Firms with global coverage and a massive number of redundant installations in their customers' proximity expose them a little less to this kind of risk.