Here is some pics of what it looked like before, spg 1-4 , and it’s history https://baxtel.com/data-center/ovh-strasbourg-campus
SBG3 is almost adjacent to SBG2. It is impressive that the firefighters saved SGB3 with minimal damage.
Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
541–550 of 613 posts
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
The publicity damage alone will be on par with (if not bigger) their replacement costs. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to rebrand. The timing is so bad that it becomes almost suspicious. When is the best time to sabotage your competitor? When they are the most visible.
> The publicity damage alone will be on par with (if not bigger) their replacement costs. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to rebrand. Honest question: which publicity damage? A fire in a datacenter is very much part of the things you should expect to see happen when you operate a large number of datacenters and will obviously cause some disruption to your customers hosting physical servers there. Provided the dis…
Most people I feel would expect fire suppression to kick in and prevent the whole data center (and the adjacent ones) from catching on fire. The fact that it didn't is concerning regarding their operations since they build their own custom data centers. The fire isn't the issue, how much damage it did is the issue. So one can ask if there was there a systematic set of planning mistakes of which this is just the first to surface?
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#543Most modern data centres wouldn't have had this issue, at least in in Australia they use Argonite suppression systems, these work by using a gas that is a mixture of argon and nitrogen that suppresses fire by depleting oxygen in the the data hall.
I don't think Aussie dc's are all the same. Globalswitch in Sydney uses inergen but Equinix is using water at least at SY1 but I'm reasonably sure that GS is much older
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#544Almost 11 years ago (March 27 2010) in Ukraine datacenter of company Hosting.ua went in flames as clients were watching their systems go unresponsive at various rows of the datacenter.
Anti-fire systems didn't kick-in. The reason? For couple of days the system was detecting a little bit of smoke from one of the devices. Operators weren't able to pinpoint exact location, considered it a false alarm and manually switched anti-fire system off.
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#545I can't see anything about a fire suppression system mentioned? Doesn't OVH have one, except for colocation datacenters? A fire detection system using eg. lasers and Inergen(or Argonite) for putting the fire out is commonly used in datacenters. The gas fills the room and reduces the amount of oxygen in the room so most fires are put out within a minute. The cool thing is that the gas is designed to be used in rooms w…
At a datacentre I used to visit years ago, part of the site induction was learning that if the fire suppression alarm went off, you had a certain amount of time to get out of the room before the argon would deploy, so you should always have a path to the nearest exit in mind. The implication was that it wasn't safe to be in the room once it deployed, but I don't know for sure.
Inergen is used to lower oxygen to ~12.5 %, from normal 21 %. Most fires need more than 16 % oxygen.
Inergen consists of 52 % nitrogen, 40 % argon and 8 % carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide might sound strange, but it causes the heart to beat faster to compensate for the lowered amounts of oxygen.
The whole point of Inergen is to quickly put out fires where water/foam/powder isn't usable and the room might contain people.
It's cool stuff, and I was under the impression that basically all datacenters used it.
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
reserved a1.large instances are about half the price of OVH's b2-7 instance. a1.xlarge are still cheaper (and larger). So you get more raw compute per dollar on AWS. What?
If you need that large machines, and are willing to use reserved instances, you'd go with dedis on OVH instead of VMs. Which is significantly cheaper
OVH dedicated instances start at about the size of an a1.metal instance, which is ~30% more than the comparable OVH instance, but you can get discounts in various ways.
Or you could use t4g.2xlarge, which is cheaper. There's no situation where OVH is 3x cheaper (I mean maybe if bandwidth is your thing, but IDK).
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they failed to install it. They only mention smoke detection: https://www.ovh.com/world/us/about-us/datacenters.xml
In French but with pictures: https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/ovh-et-la-protection-inc... - probably a different OVH data centre, but they clearly have sprinklers there. The argument they made against gas extinguishers is by the time they have to use it, the data is gone anyway, and it's only going to trigger in the affected areas. It's also far safer for the people working there.
That's very interesting find! Google translate seemed to do a good enough job on it for me. 8 years ago and there are people in that thread ripping on what they see in the photos.
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#548Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#549Back 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…
ovh monitoring is even better, everything is green on the destroyed dc http://status.ovh.com/vms/index_sbg2.html
Re: Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
#550I 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 abou…
There's a big link from their homepage: https://www.ovh.ie/news/press/cpl1786.fire-our-strasbourg-si...
It says they've alerted customers, but I expect some have been missed, through inaccurate email records, email hosted on the systems that have been destroyed etc.