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Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

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Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#441

Post by traveler01 »

geocrasher wrote: post #10

The classic "lp0 on fire" error message comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire Really though, I feel truly awful for anyone affected by this. The post recommends implementing a disaster recovery plan. The truth is that most people don't have one. So, let's use this post to talk about Disaster Recovery Plans! Mine: I have 5 servers at OVH (not at SBG) and they all back up to Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2…

Most people/companies don't have money to setup those disaster plans. They need you to have a similar server ready to go and also a backuo solution like Amazon S3.

I was affected, my personal VPS is safe but down and other VPS I was managing I don't know anything about. I have the backups and right now I'd love for them to just set me up a new VPS so I can restore the backups and restore the services.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#442

Post by MrQuimico »

I have a VPS in SBG1.

So far I haven't got any communication from OVH alerting me about this. I think that's the first thing they should do, alerting their customers that something it's happening.

Anyway I was running a service that I was about to close, so this may be it. I do have a recovery plan, but I don't know it it is worth it at this point.

I'm never using OVH again. The fire can happen, but don't ask me about my recovery plan, what about yours?

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#443

Post by Diederich »

Back in the late 90s, I implemented the first systematic monitoring of WalMart Store's global network, including all of the store routers, hubs (not switches yet!) and 900mhz access points. Did you know that WalMart had some stores in Indonesia? They did until 1998.

So when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1998_riots_of_Indonesia started happening, we heard some harrowing stories of US employees being abducted, among other things.

Around that same time, the equipment in the Jakarta store started sending high temperature alerts prior to going offline. Our NOC wasn't able to reach anyone in the store.

The alerts were quite accurate: that was one of the many buildings that had been burned down in the riots. I guess it's slightly surprising that electrical power to the equipment in question lasted long enough to allow temperature alerting. Most of our stores back then used satellite for their permanent network connection, so it's possible telcom died prior to the fire reaching the UPC office.

In a couple of prominent places in the home office, there were large cutouts of all of the countries WalMart was in at the time up on the walls. A couple of weeks after this event, the Indonesia one was taken down over the weekend and the others re-arranged.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#444

Post by paco3346 »

mike_d wrote: post #263
ilkkao wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to see now that a lightly constructed five story cube might not be a fully fire proof.

Would you humor us with a link to a fully fire proof datacenter?

Newly constructed datacenters in the US tend to be all metal with a full building clean suppression agent. https://www.fike.com/products/ecaro-25-clean-agent-fire-supp...

I used to work for a provider whose 2 main datacenters of 8k+ sq ft could pull all oxygen out of the building in 60 seconds.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#445

Post by nixgeek »

hedora wrote: post #423
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Data centers frequently burn down, or are destroyed by natural disaster. These days, fire suppression systems need to be non-lethal, so inert gasses are out. Water is too, for obvious reasons. Last I checked, they flooded the inside of the DC with airborne powder that coats everything (especially the inside of anything with a running fan). Once that deploys, the machines in the data center are a write off even if the…

Most datacenters I’ve worked with in the last 5 years use water.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#446

Post by treesknees »

ev1 wrote: post #374
7ewis wrote: 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…

OVH is one of the largest providers in the world. They run a sub brand for personal use (bare metal for $5/m, hardware replacements in 30 min or less usually). ..and they do support all of those things you just listed, not just API-backed bare metal.

Is that a typo? I only see OVH bare metal starting at >$50. How could a provider offer a bare metal server for $5?

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#447

Post by ev1 »

treesknees wrote: post #446
ev1 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OVH is one of the largest providers in the world. They run a sub brand for personal use (bare metal for $5/m, hardware replacements in 30 min or less usually). ..and they do support all of those things you just listed, not just API-backed bare metal.

Is that a typo? I only see OVH bare metal starting at >$50. How could a provider offer a bare metal server for $5?

OVH has new servers.

Their sub-brand soyoustart has older servers (that are still perfectly fine), roughly E3 Xeon/16-32GB/3x2TB to 4x2TB for $40/m ex vat.

Their other sub brand kimsufi for personal servers has Atom low-power bare metal with 2TB HDD (in reality it is advertised 500GB/1TB, but they don't really have any of those in stock left, if your drive fails they replace it with a 2T - so far this has been my exp) for $5.

All of this is powered by automation, you don't really get any support and you are expected to be competent. If your server is hacked you get PXE-rebooted into a rescue system and can scp/rsync off your contents before your server is reinstalled. OS installs, reboots, provisioning are all automated, there's essentially no human contact.

PS: Scaleway, in Paris, used to offer $2 bare metal (ultra low voltage, weaker than an Atom, 2GB ram), but pulled all their cheap machines, raised prices on existing users, and rebranded as enterprisey. The offer was called 'kidechire'

--

It is kind of interesting that on the US side everyone is in disbelief, or like "why not use AWS" - while most of the European market knows of OVH, Hetzner, etc.

My own reason for using OVH? It's affordable and I would not have gotten many projects (and the gaming community I help out with) off the ground otherwise. I can rent bare metal with NVMe, and several terabytes of RAM for less than my daily wage for the whole month, and not worry about per-GB billing or attacks. In the gaming world you generally do not ever want to use usage based billing - made the mistake of using Cloudfront and S3 once and banned script kiddies would wget-loop the largest possible file from the most expensive region botnet repeatedly in a money-DoS.

I legitimately wouldn't have been able to do my "for-fun-and-learning" side projects (no funding, no accelerator credits, ...) without someone like them. The equivalent of a digitalocean $1000/m VM is about $100 on OVH.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#448

Post by brmgb »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #316
brmgb wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's serious. You are entierly missing the point by quoting the compliance programs followed by AWS whose sole business is being a third party hoster. For most business, what you call sensitive data is customers and orders listing, payment history, inventory if you are dealing in physical goods and HR related files. These are not state secrets. Encryption and a modicum of physical security go a long way. I…

This is quite a significant revision to your previous statement that there’s nothing about a data center that makes it more secure than your house. This attitude that your data isn’t very important, so it’s fine to not be very concerned about it’s security, while not entirely uncommon, is something most organisations try to avoid when choosing vendors. It’s something consumers are generally unconcerned about, until a…

> This is quite a significant revision to your previous statement that there’s nothing about a data center that makes it more secure than your house.

I said there was nothing magical about data centers security, a point I stand with.

It's all about proper storage (encryption) and physical security. Obviously, the physical security of an AWS data center will be tighter that your typical SME but in a way which is of no significance to storing backups.

> This attitude that your data isn’t very important

You are once again missing the point.

It's not that your data isn't important. It's that storing it encrypted in a sensible place (and to be clear by that I just mean not lying around - a drawer in an office or your server room seems perfectly adequate to me) is secure enough.

The benefits of having easily available backups by far trump the utterly far fetched idea that someone might break into your office to steal your encrypted backups.

Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building

#449

Post by 1MachineElf »

Diederich wrote: post #443

Back in the late 90s, I implemented the first systematic monitoring of WalMart Store's global network, including all of the store routers, hubs (not switches yet!) and 900mhz access points. Did you know that WalMart had some stores in Indonesia? They did until 1998. So when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1998_riots_of_Indonesia started happening, we heard some harrowing stories of US employees being abducted, amon…

Thanks for sharing this interesting story. Part of my family immigrated from Indonesia due to those riots, but I was unaware up until today of the details covered by the Wikipedia article you linked.

I remember during the 2000s and 2010s that WalMart in the USA earned a reputation for it's inventories primarily consisting of Chinese-made goods. I'm not sure if that reputation goes all the way back to 1998, but it makes me wonder if WalMart was especially targeted by the anti-Chinese element of the Indonesian riots because it.

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