Data Centre fire

If you have any problems with European (and maybe other overseas) websites for a few days, this might be why:

Fire destroys OVHCloud's SBG2 data center in Strasbourg

Scary times for many. You wouldn’t know, but OVH is the world’s 3rd largest cloud hosting company.

More here:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/ovh/

I knew they weren't tiddlers, but I didn't realise how big they are until today.

I spent much of the day having some highly uncharitable thoughts about one website I use... had to do some mental apologising

Just been reading about that. Very extensive destruction.
It hammers home the old mantra that if you don't have any external backups, then you don't care about your data.
I read that OVH are planning on putting in 10,000 new servers.

Right, need to devote a day or so to seriously think through all my data storage and backup facilities. Time to put security above cost.

Read it here today on Lichess. https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/fire-in-a...

Fortunately they have back-up servers so no chess stats, etc have been erased. I too was worried and there was a Lichess server outage 2 days ago at around 2am, which kinda coincides with this incident. Not sure if it is a conspiracy or just purely coincidental.

My first question when reading this was...what happened to the fire suppression system? Every DC I ever worked in had automatic discharge equipment - usually with very large (and loud) “Get out Now!” lights and klaxons that gave 60 secs warning. Perhaps it had been ‘locked out’ and could not be activated, although with multiple buildings/zones affected something should have triggered?

I expect there are a few ‘senior managers’ facing difficult questions about their DR & BC plans.

Nasty incident and has made me rethink my backup strategy, cloud is sold as a panacea but it just isn’t, and you only find out just how bad things are when this sort of ooops happens.

In reply to a post by clyde123:

Right, need to devote a day or so to seriously think through all my data storage and backup facilities. Time to put security above cost.

When the matter of backup and/or disaster recovery systems arises, far too many people ask the wrong question... rather than "Can we afford to do it?" it should be "Can we afford to not do it?"

In reply to a post by MercuryRH2:

My first question when reading this was...what happened to the fire suppression system?

That was my question, from the 1960s mainframe computer suites, big data centres have had sensative detection (e.g. VESDA) and then suppression gas systems.

Maybe they had detection, but not suppression for cost reasons? Hopefully insurance will pay up for rebuilding!