Fire destroyed OVH data centre in Strasbourg

One of French cloud provider OVH’s data centres in Strasbourg was on fire, which caused major disruptions. Users were recommended to activate disaster recovery plans.

“We have a major incident on SBG2. The fire declared in the building. Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated which impacts all services in SGB1-4. We recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan,” OVH CEO Octave Klaba tweeted.

At 7:20 AM Paris time, he posted an update that the fire is contained.

“Fire is over. Firefighters continue to cool the buildings with the water. We don’t have the access to the site. That is why SBG1, SBG3, SBG4 won’t be restarted today,” he tweeted.

It seems that nobody was hurt.

The Register, which reported the fire first, claims that this fire will almost certainly lead to an investigation as data centres are built to suppress fire.

A number of OVH users complained about their applications being down.

OVH has 27 data centres in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

"We sincerely apologize for the difficulties and challenges caused by this fire. We are committed to continue to communicate with the greatest transparency about the cause of the fire and its consequences," OVH stated in a press release.

OVH is currently assessing the impact of this incident. "

"We will communicate as transparently as possible on the progress of our analyses and the implementation of solutions. All of our communication channels, starting with our incident tracking platform (travaux.ovh.com), are accessible so that you can stay informed of developments in real-time," OVH stated.

The most cost-effective Disaster Recovery plan

“As a tech company that works with data centres all over the world, we’re shocked by the news of the fire at OVH,” Jake Madders, director of Hyve Managed Hosting, told CyberNews via email.

According to him, this incident highlights the importance for companies to have a Disaster Recovery plan in place.

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to have offsite backups for moments just like this. It also illustrates the danger of housing multiple data centres in one location - in this case four. One has been destroyed, another badly damaged and the other two offline because of a fire in one of the centres. And we don’t know what the water damage from putting the fires out has caused either,” he said.

The most cost-effective Disaster Recovery plan is to back up data to various data centres, located far away from each other, and preferably owned by different companies. 

“They will create a carbon copy of the data, which is synchronized on a regular basis. It might take a week to recover and create new infrastructure, but at least you’ve got your data. A lot of companies don’t understand how to diversify their data centres, or why it’s so important to do so. This time it was a fire, another time it might be a company going bust, turning off its power,” he said in a statement.