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Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

travaux.ovh.net

431–440 of 613 posts

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#431
post #146

According to the official status page, the whole datacenter is still green http://status.ovh.com/vms/index_sbg2.html

I feel like there should be place to report infrastructure suppliers with misleading status pages, some kind of crowdsourced database. Without this information, you only find out that they are misleading when something goes very wrong. At best you might be missing out on some SLA refunds, but at worst it could be disasterous for a business. I've been on the wrong side of a update-by-hand status system from a hosting…

Who monitors the monitors?

Agreed, though. A fake status page is worse than no status page. I don't mind if the status page states that it's manually updated every few hours as long as it's honest. But don't make it look like it's automated when it's not.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#433
There have been a handful of talks at computer security conferences talking about setting up physical traps in server chassis (such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrzIjxO8MOs). Since seeing those I've been waiting for some idiot to try something like that in a physical server and burn down a data center.

There is NO evidence that is what happened here, and I don't think OVH allows customers to bring their own equipment making even less likely. Still I wait and hope to hear a root cause from this one.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OVH is a European equivalent to Digital Ocean. It has twice the revenue, and is the third largest hosting provider in the world.

Twice the revenue of DigitalOcean still puts it < $1B ARR, or am I missing something? I can’t see how that’s the third largest in the world, or does your definition of “hosting provider” exclude clouds?

I took it from the top of their Wikipedia page.

In any case, they aren't "primarily for personal use".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#435

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/1369504527544705025 "Update 5:20pm. Everybody is safe. Fire destroyed SBG2. A part of SBG1 is destroyed. Firefighters are protecting SBG3. no impact SBG4."

> Fire destroyed SBG2 This is crazy. SBG2 was HUGE and if this isn't a translation error on the part of Octave (which I could understand given the stress and ESL) I have a hard time fathoming what kind of fire could destroy a whole facility with nearly 1000 racks of equipment spread out across separated halls. I'm really hoping "destroyed" here means "we lost all power and network core and there's smoke/fire/physical…

I wonder if they had batteries inside the containers. That can make a bad situation really worse.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#436
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not done any research into it, but I always thought OVH was supposed to be a very budget VPS service primarily for personal use rather than business. Although thought it was akin to having a Raspberry Pi plugged in at home. Again, I may be completely wrong but why would you not use AWS/GCP? Even if it's complexity, Amazon have Lightsail, or if it's cost I thought DigitalOcean was one of the only reputable business-gr…

You cant imagine it yet big chunk of the independent internet runs on small vps servers. There isnt much difference between DO and OVH, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode... not sure why DO would be better. I mean its US company doing marketing right. Thats the difference. Plus ovh/hetzner have only EU locations. I think small bussinesses like smaller simple providers instead of bigclouds. Its different philosophy if you are afr…

OVH has at least one large North American datacenter in Beauharnois, located just south of Montreal. I've used them before for cheap dedicated servers. They may have others.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#437
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it been replaced since I last used it in ~2016? This is not the interface I had to use at all. This is the interface they had when I used them last: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-J_DO_FS0

Yes it changed. It was replaced by a more modern version a few years ago (but the transition was painful, as not everything was implemented in the new version when they started to deploy it).

for me, at times you'd not bother trying to remember your NIC-handle and just curl the API instead out of laziness

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#438
post #416
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://downdetector.fr/

Wtf is this disclaimer on Down Detector for? (Navigate to OVH page.). It sits in front of user comments, I think: > Unable to display this content to due missing consent. By law, we are required to ask your consent to show the content that is normally displayed here.

It's a Disqus widget. If you denied consent for third party tracking, they can't load it.

I've usually seen this with embedded videos rather than comments.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#439

Some pictures of the building with firefighters at work https://www.dna.fr/faits-divers-justice/2021/03/10/strasbour... Edit: Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9jL_THG58U Satellite view of the site on Google Maps https://goo.gl/maps/L2T6YNFCtiyDdiNv7

That is a disturbingly large amount of flame. I was expecting a datacenter to not have much in the way of flammable material. ...then I read in some other comments here that they used wood in the interior construction.

Wood is a reasonable construction material.

It takes a good while to start burning, and even when significantly charred it still retains most of its strength.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#440

> In the case of Roubaix 4, the Datacenter is made with a lot of wood: > Finally, we have other photos of the floor of the OVH "Roubaix 4" tower. It is clearly wood! Hope it's fireproof wood! A wooden datacenter ... is still original, we must admit. > In France, data centers are mainly regulated by the labor code, by ICPE recommendations (with authorization or declaration) and by insurers. At the purely regulatory le…

Ah, interesting pics and discussions (in French) in the neighboring thread: https://lafibre.info/datacenter/incendie-sur-un-site-ovh-a-s...
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