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Comment by aritmo | Hacker News Reader

The video was badly prepared. He was talking about datacentre names as if the audience are his own employees and are fully aware of the different buildings. He could at least have some graphics.

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It certainly wasn't well prepared. But it did everything there is to be done in such a situation. An quick apology, details about the situation, and what is being done. I didn't have any problem understanding what was being said. I don't know the details about the buildings but I don't think it is necessary to understand the general idea. Datacenter caught fire and was completely destroyed, some damage in the surrounding buildings, old buildings are worse than new buildings.

A nice presentation would have been great, but if there is a choice, I'd rather have the CEO work on the problem than polish his presentation.

Edit: He also named some people. I don't know who they are, I can only guess they are employees, and while I don't really care personally, I think it is tasteful to name them since they did the right thing by intervening quickly and not being reckless.

OVH deserve points for being one of the only hosting providers I know that make their entire network weathermap available to the public, showing all their global interconnects and then letting you channel it down to a per-DC level: http://weathermap.ovh.net/#europe

Interesting. Are there popular tools to build such diagrams or is this a bespoke creation? ie are they using scripts+graphviz directly or is there some middlewear doing things?

As a customer I understood the video perfectly. Those names appear on every invoice and during every order

And probably you as a customer are a main target of such video, but the fire was such a high-profile case (I think) that this should be more understandable for general audience.

edit: not sure why I got downvoted (and I don't really care that much), I just think that communication from CEO of big company after such event should be clear for everyone, not only for those directly affected.

Honestly, nobody lost their lives, the impact is pretty much limited to OVH (who need to find a new building), their customers (who need to find new servers and restore backups), and the city of strasbourg (who run the emergency services and presumably will have some involvement in the cleanup). While we're all interested in a "Oh, are we prepared if that happened to our provider?" sense, I don't see why OVH is obliged to provide communications to us, rather than to their customers.

I would expect the communication to be directly targeted to customers not the general public.

But ... the video isn't for a general audience. He doesn't have any reason to apologize to a general audience. His customers are the only people that matter in this situation and this video is for them.

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