OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#31

Post by justicezyx » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

ev1 wrote: post #18

justicezyx wrote: post #16

This would be one of inherient difference between smaller vs. giga players in cloud hosting. AWS/Google/Azure, if this happens, there should only be limited outage to a small fraction of customers. As a matter of fact, Google had such an incident before, and literally no customers (internal and external) noticed.

This is an apples to oranges comparison. OVH largely sells bare metal; their public cloud wasn't really impacted. If you are using AWS, Google, or Azure, ran a single (or multiple machines) inside a single AZ with no backups and opted out of snapshots, you would face the exact same situation. I can definitely say I see people complaining about how everything they have is down on AWS when us-east-1 goes down periodica…

Oh good to know. I don't use OvH, and my limited understanding were from their products page which lists VM style offerings. I had assumed VMs were the major use cases on OvH.

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#32

Post by abluecloud » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

notJim wrote: post #27

Not to be rude, but it's really wild to me that even after all this time during the pandemic, the CEO doesn't have a headset he can use so that the audio is intelligible. It's gotta be one of the highest ROI investments you can possibly make at this point.

a functioning fire suppression system would have probably been better but second to that i guess a mic would be a good investment

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#33

Post by Saris » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

justicezyx wrote: post #16

This would be one of inherient difference between smaller vs. giga players in cloud hosting. AWS/Google/Azure, if this happens, there should only be limited outage to a small fraction of customers. As a matter of fact, Google had such an incident before, and literally no customers (internal and external) noticed.

It also depends if you're renting a dedicated server, vs cloud/VPS. AWS/Google/Azure deal with virtualized systems that can be moved around to another server easily.

OVH has a lot of dedicated servers as well though, so if you're using one of those then it can't be moved very easily to avoid downtime.

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#34

Post by mikepurvis » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:32 PM UTC

deftnerd wrote: post #23

Are there industry options or methods of wiring to allow for a UPS room separate from the actual rooms the racks are stored in? It's almost tradition to have a rack with UPS's in the bottom and then the rest of the space filled with servers or drive arrays. We wouldn't ever think of putting a tiny backup generator in the bottom of every rack, so why do we put a battery storage system there? Also, with the advances in…

For the extreme opposite of that, Google famously trolled everyone 10 years ago by announcing that every one of their servers had its own in-chassis 12V battery:

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-uncloaks-once-secret-server...

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#35

Post by ev1 » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

justicezyx wrote: post #31

ev1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an apples to oranges comparison. OVH largely sells bare metal; their public cloud wasn't really impacted. If you are using AWS, Google, or Azure, ran a single (or multiple machines) inside a single AZ with no backups and opted out of snapshots, you would face the exact same situation. I can definitely say I see people complaining about how everything they have is down on AWS when us-east-1 goes down periodica…

Oh good to know. I don't use OvH, and my limited understanding were from their products page which lists VM style offerings. I had assumed VMs were the major use cases on OvH.

The pricing on their dedicated servers are cheaper than most 1-2GB VMs on cloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/ - this is their flagship and most expensive brand, the cheaper ones are even less

The funniest tweets demanding their data and saying they'll lose everything are the people running:

https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873 - GTA5 multiplayer gameserver that begs for donations. Running on one of the cheaper sub-brands of OVH probably (soyoustart, for GAME ddos-protection). $30-40/machine.

https://twitter.com/pdfshift/status/1369550522479480833 - I can't tell if this is a troll

https://twitter.com/KatsanosAlex/status/1369501497348812801 - I can't tell if this is a troll

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#36

Post by kazen44 » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

deftnerd wrote: post #23

Are there industry options or methods of wiring to allow for a UPS room separate from the actual rooms the racks are stored in? It's almost tradition to have a rack with UPS's in the bottom and then the rest of the space filled with servers or drive arrays. We wouldn't ever think of putting a tiny backup generator in the bottom of every rack, so why do we put a battery storage system there? Also, with the advances in…

in most datacenters, the UPS's are stored in the same collum like structure as their generators. A Datacenter is divided into vertical columns, with eacht collum being powered by redundant power feeds, generator(s) and UPS's.

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#37

Post by tpmx » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:36 PM UTC

notJim wrote: post #27

Not to be rude, but it's really wild to me that even after all this time during the pandemic, the CEO doesn't have a headset he can use so that the audio is intelligible. It's gotta be one of the highest ROI investments you can possibly make at this point.

It's quite consistent with how the entire operation is run, at least when witnessed from the outside as a customer.

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#38

Post by riffic » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:36 PM UTC

nickdothutton wrote: post #20

Lucky it wasn’t a UPS explosion. https://h2tools.org/lessons/battery-room-explosion

There are a couple good bell system practice documents covering lead-acid battery hazards:

* http://etler.com/docs/bsp-archive/157/157-601-701_I19.pdf

* http://etler.com/docs/bsp-archive/157/157-601-101_I7.pdf

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#39

Post by jonas21 » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

ev1 wrote: post #18

justicezyx wrote: post #16

This would be one of inherient difference between smaller vs. giga players in cloud hosting. AWS/Google/Azure, if this happens, there should only be limited outage to a small fraction of customers. As a matter of fact, Google had such an incident before, and literally no customers (internal and external) noticed.

This is an apples to oranges comparison. OVH largely sells bare metal; their public cloud wasn't really impacted. If you are using AWS, Google, or Azure, ran a single (or multiple machines) inside a single AZ with no backups and opted out of snapshots, you would face the exact same situation. I can definitely say I see people complaining about how everything they have is down on AWS when us-east-1 goes down periodica…

On the other hand, just about every month, there's a story on HN saying why are you wasting your money on AWS when OVH is so much cheaper (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966028).

And well, I guess this is one of the reasons.

Re: OVH CEO Octave Klaba speaking about the incident [video]

#40

Post by tyingq » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

Two interesting pictures from the earlier story...

How close the 3 data centers are in SBG: https://cdn.baxtel.com/data-center/ovh-strasbourg-campus/pho...

How hot that fire was. I'm pretty sure the orange spots are holes melted in the walls that are made from metal shipping containers: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwGqV17XMAMF_wa?format=jpg&name=...