OVHcloud details service restart following Strasbourg fire

Power to be rebooted at some facilities this week

OVHcloud has detailed plans for a phased restart of data centre services after a fire devastated its SBG2 facility in Strasbourg, France last week.

Power at SBG3 will be fully restored today, 16 March, in preparation for a gradual restart of data centre services on 22 March. The cloud provider aims to have power restarted at SBG4 on 17 March ahead of a gradual server restart on 22 March.

No servers within SBG3 or SBG4 were damaged by the blaze, which completely destroyed SBG2 and damaged four rooms inside SBG1. However, power was temporarily restarted successfully at SBG1 on 13 March and will be permanently rebooted on 1 March. OVHcloud is aiming for a gradual server restart there on 22 March, too.

As part of efforts to restore services to the three facilities, a rotating team of 60 people is working 24 hours a day to connect mobile network and electricity units.

Today, 16 March, the restoration team is focused on drying SGB3 buildings and removing soot from their server rooms.

“60 tech work on the site. Still lot of to do, but it’s going faster that expected. We keep the same ETA and maybe we will be faster,” tweeted CEO and founder Octave Klaba on Twitter, who has received praise for his transparency and communication throughout the incident.

OVHcloud is updating a status page breaking down service status and the steps it is taking to restore customer data hosted in servers damaged by the blaze.

The cloud provider said it has reached out to customers most affected with options for replacement infrastructure in alternative data centres.

“For customers who have been impacted, we are offering replacement infrastructures (Bare Metal, Hosted Private Cloud and Public Cloud) in our Roubaix (RBX) and Gravelines (GRA) datacentres,” reads the status page.

“We are committed to providing around 15,000 new servers in the coming week.”

OVHcloud support teams and account managers have reached out to customers to implement Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) mechanims and have set up a support plan for customers who have not yet activated their DRP.

The cause of the outbreak has not been categorically determined but OVHcloud suspects uninterruptible power supplies at SGB2 were at fault.

In a video published last week, Klaba revealed that firefighters discovered UPS systems burning when they reached the fire at SGB2 on Wednesday.