Remember the OVHcloud data center fire? Here's why it was so bad (2022)

techradar.com

33 points·mkl95··11 comments

Short summary: The building did not have an electrical cutoff mechanism, it lacked an automatic fire extinguisher system, it had wooden ceiling, and two inner courtyards acted as chimneys.

Sounds like the worst possible setup if you want to avoid a catastrophic loss due to fire.

Or...the BEST possible setup if you don't mind the opposite.

How did they make out with their insurance?

> more than 140 customers filed a class-action lawsuit, seeking damages for losses.

I wonder how many of those suing OVH (presumably for lacking due diligence in the DC design) have paid out to their customers for lacking the due diligence to have properly engineered & tested DR plans (off-provider backups etc.).

The original article (linked by the submission) is more informative: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/22/ovhcloud_fire_datacen...

(2022)

Lots of discussion about this then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30763945

With this event and the recent Global Switch / Google Cloud datacenter fire in Paris, we, the French, hope we now have proven our experience in burning datacenters enough. Feel free to reach us if you ever need to burn some datacenters inadvertently, we'll happy to give a hand. We can help by leveraging our unmatched knowledge in advanced technologies and materials like water sourced from clouds.

It would be interesting to know the DC project author/company name.

OVHCloud builds their own DCs.

If physical security (against fire, in this case) in their DCs is clearly not good, then how safe is data?

There's a reason that OVH is usually seen as a trash, low quality provider. :)

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