1. About OVH company
OVH is a French company created in 1999 by Octave Klaba and specializing
in the hosting of web servers.
The company is the first European operator of the cloud (means to store
data remotely) and is increasingly courted by individuals and professionals.
The company has 30 data centers worldwide, more than half of which are
in France.
OVH now competes with the leaders of the cloud world, the famous GAFAM
(Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft).
Its headquarters are based in Roubaix (North of France), and the company
has opened many branches, including some in the West, such as in Rennes, Nantes
and Brest.
2. The Fire broke
The fire that broke out during the night of March 9 to 10 on the site of
the company OVH cloud in Strasbourg, specializing in computer servers has been
"contained".
That was announced Wednesday morning the prefecture of Bas-Rhin.
The fire broke out around 1am in the Port du Rhin district, east of the
Alsatian capital, not far from the German border, and mobilized 101
firefighters and 43 vehicles.
"Thanks to a strong mobilization of firefighters, the fire on the
site has been contained," announced the prefecture in a statement, shortly
before 7 am.
Operational resources have also been mobilized by the German
authorities.
The prefecture specified that the site was not classified Seveso,
contrary to what it had announced at first. It indicated that no toxic
pollution had been detected, despite the large plume of smoke.
Major damage was caused to the Strasbourg site of OVHcloud, which hosts
the data of many companies.
One building out of four was destroyed, but the fire did not cause any
human casualties.
The fire is extinguished but the servers of OVHcloud in Strasbourg are
still out of order.
The fire that broke out around 1am and the impressive smoke cloud… that
resulted totally destroyed the main building of the Strasbourg site of the
French champion of online computing ("cloud computing").
The fire, in progress since 3 am in the district of Port du Rhin, east
of the Alsatian capital, is now "contained", said the services of the
prefecture in the morning.
On the spot, a hundred firemen were mobilized and the employees of the
company could only notice the damage on their arrival on the site., as shown in
this video of a journalist of the Dernières nouvelles d'Alsace:
Contrary to what it had initially indicated, the Bas-Rhin prefecture has
specified that the site is not classified as Seveso.
However, the industrial zone
where the building is located, near the French-German border, has several
Seveso sites.
No toxic pollution was detected, despite the large plume of smoke,
according to the prefectural authorities. There were no victims.
3. One building destroyed, another badly damaged
On the technical level, this fire caused the destruction of one of the accommodation
centers, the SBG2 building.
Part of another building, Strasbourg 1, was destroyed. According to Octave
Klaba, the founder of OVHcloud., the servers of the Strasbourg 3 building are
extinguished but were not affected, as well as those of a fourth building.
In total, the company counted Wednesday noon about twenty services down
because of this incident. The objective is now to set up a restart plan, on
buildings 3 and 4 and possibly SBG1.
This is a major blow for the company, which was planning an IPO this
week.
In total, OVH has nearly thirty data centers around the world, half of
which are in France.
The French "unicorn", whose headquarters are based in Roubaix,
employs more than 2,200 people and claims more than 1.5 million customers worldwide
thanks to its 380,000 servers.
The first of four data centers in Strasbourg was installed in 2012.
As several experts have pointed out on Twitter, the data contained in
the servers of the destroyed building will probably be irretrievable., unless
it has been backed up elsewhere, at other hosting companies or on other OVH
servers.
4. A poorly designed fire prevention system?
It remains to be seen whether the fire prevention systems deployed in
the OVH data centers in Strasbourg did not contribute… to accelerate the
destruction of the servers.
OVHCloud's DCs are indeed equipped with water sprinklers that are
activated only where there is a fire thanks to temperature sensors installed
every two bays.
"This is nothing like the very high-pressure misting systems, where
the water evaporates instantly, and which save the machines.
Here, it sprinkles, and all the
servers are dead," points out a La Fibre.info contributor in a report done
at OVH in 2013.
Most data centers don't use water to fight fire, but inert gas that drains server rooms of oxygen to smother the fire while avoiding damage to equipment.
This is not the choice OVHCloud made.
5. Many websites offline
Leader in computer data hosting, OVH, now called OVHcloud, hosts many
websites in France and abroad and serves as a service provider to many
companies or developers.
"When you have spent a week setting up an infrastructure and the
servers catch fire a week before going live," tweeted a dejected
developer.
If the site data.gouv.fr was blocked for a while, it went back online in
the morning.
However, several official platforms hosted by OVH (antidiscriminations.fr,
marches-publics.gouv.fr) are still inaccessible.
The company hosts a multitude of services or institutions that have
reported, as the sports clubs ASM Rugby.., AS Nancy Lorraine or the Pompidou
Center in Paris, on social networks:
German, Italian, Polish or Turkish sites are also affected, says the
Dernières nouvelles d'Alsace.
The most cautious will have no trouble activating backups, contracting
security. But small structures or amateur sites may not have this level of
precaution and may never be able to recover their data.
"The fire affecting a major OVH site reminds us of a fundamental
fact that is too often forgotten: a Web site, a critical Internet activity, is
duplicated on at least two distinct providers.
Digital technology is not infallible and remains subject to the laws of
the real world," notes Alexandre Archambault, a lawyer specializing in digital
issues.
