In a video released today, OVHcloud founder and Chairman Octave Klaba has promised to provide free data backups in the near future for its customers, after fire broke out last week in OVHcloud’s Strasbourg data centers – which destroyed at least the SBG2 facility. Mr.Klaba believes that the fire incident in Strasbourg could change the standards in the cloud/hosting industry as a whole, enhancing the backup security of hosted IT infrastructures.
“At least it will change our way of delivering cloud and hosting services,” said Octave Klaba. “We will increase backup security of IT infrastructures hosted in our data centers by offering data backups for free. So, without charging anything extra for it, we will provide data backups by default. This will be our answer to the fire incident. We don’t want this to ever happen again in the future.”
In the aftermath of the fire at OVHcloud’s data centers in Strasbourg, France, there seemed to be some misunderstanding among customers with regard to responsibilities towards backups and business continuity strategies. To address this issue and in order to avoid any future discussion on this subject, OVHcloud will start adding free backups to its global cloud and hosting services by default.
Data Center UPSs on Fire
Cause of the fire in SBG2 is probably one of the uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs), actually UPS7, which was in maintenance at the time of the fire. When firefighters arrived, UPS7 (the UPS serving SBG2) and UPS8 were ablaze.
In joint cooperation with experts from its insurer, OVHcloud is rebuilding and restarting its data center services in Strasbourg step by step. Their SBG1, SGB3 and SBG4 data centers are expected to be restarted very soon now. The networking infrastructure and high voltage power are being restored now, after which servers can be restarted rack by rack. Today, the checks and validation of all UPSs in Strasbourg should be completed. OVHcloud will then first start with restarting a test rack, after which other data center racks can be restarted as well.
Some servers need to be cleaned first before restarting them. Especially OVHcloud’s SBG3 data center had quite a bit of smoke on its fifth floor. As said in our article last week, OVHcloud will deploy 15,000 new servers – of which 6,500 servers should be delivered already by the end of this week.
Update 16 mars 8:30pm
Here, the 10min's video with last updates about the fire in our DC in SBG2. pic.twitter.com/BPaa9pEBZk— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 16, 2021
