Fire Has Destroyed OVH’s Strasbourg Data Center

[lainey]

I had a quick search on SOTT and I couldn't see if this has been covered yet. There was a fire on Wednesday morning which destroyed one of OVH’s Strasbourg data centers and part of a second one. OVH is a cloud provider (like Google Cloud). The cause of the fire seems to be undetermined.

There is an article about it on Data Centre Knowledge and it was covered by the BBC. In the BBC article it says that Russia blames the fire for people not being able to access Google and YouTube.

Interestingly, in the BBC article it says that "The fire is believed to have affected several major online services, including the French government, cryptocurrency exchange Deribit and the Pompidou Centre in Paris." The cryptocurrency part caught my eye because of the recent Gamestop Rebellion.

 

[Chad]

I haven't really looked into the story but when it came up on my Twitter feed the other point that caught my eye was that, just days before, the company had begun to work on plans to sell shares on the stock market:

Wed, March 10, 2021, 8:41 AM·3 min read

Founded by Klaba in 1999, OVHcloud competes against U.S. giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp's Azure and Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud, which dominate the market.

"OVH is a pretty important hosting company on the internet," said Mike Prettejohn, who directs UK-based network security company Netcraft. He said the affected servers hosted 3.6 million websites, including niche government platforms in France, Britain, Poland and the Ivory Coast.

Prettejohn estimated that just under 2% of the sites with the French .FR domain extension had been affected.

French politicians have championed OVHcloud as a possible alternative to U.S. cloud services providers, but it has so far lacked the scale and financial clout to dent their market share.

The company said on Monday it had started the process for a potential IPO, without giving details.

The Strasbourg centres were among OVHcloud's 17 data centres in France, and 32 globally.

Several clients said their websites had gone offline or emails could not be accessed. There was no immediate news of any major data losses.

The Centre Pompidou, one of France's best known art complexes, said its website was down. Cryptocurrency exchange Deribit said its blog was down but that trading had not been impacted, free chess server Lichess.org said it had lost 24 hours' worth of games history and news outlet eeNews Europe said its websites were offline.

PR agency Caroline Charles Communication said its data was held at another site but that it had lost access to emails in the middle of Paris Fashion Week.

OVHcloud declined to comment on its fire safety protocols. The site did not pose a toxic risk, it added.

Millions of websites offline after fire at French cloud services firm

A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies' portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors. The fire, which broke out on Wednesday shortly after midnight at...

news.yahoo.com

IPO:

An initial public offering (IPO) or stock market launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also retail (individual) investors.

An IPO is underwritten by one or more investment banks, who also arrange for the shares to be listed on one or more stock exchanges.

Screenshot of the fire:

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[Ellipse]

And fire ignited from an UPS. UPS maintenance was performed by a vendor the day before the fire....
Fire department used a thermal camera to isolate source of fire, it seemed to originate with 2 UPSes, one of which was the recently maintained UPS.

OVH recently bought a companies with the goal to propose a competitor to Office 360.

 

[rs]

Perhaps this is something that is specific to the EU. Typically in US data centers, fire is mitigated by Halon systems. (The problem is that Halon discharge is not compatible with humans breathing.) It is curious that the story line here allows for some serious suspicions.

 

[ScottD]

Halon has been banned since the mid 90's and less toxic systems are used now. However, I do find it odd that a data center of that size would not have some sort of fire suppression system to avoid this type of destruction (or at least minimize it). The last server room project I put together had both smoke and particulate sensors and a Sapphire fire suppression system (liquid that evaporates) for only 2 racks.

 

[Ellipse]

Halon has been banned since the mid 90's and less toxic systems are used now. However, I do find it odd that a data center of that size would not have some sort of fire suppression system to avoid this type of destruction (or at least minimize it). The last server room project I put together had both smoke and particulate sensors and a Sapphire fire suppression system (liquid that evaporates) for only 2 racks.

OVH is known for its low prices. I guess this is the drawback.