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Le Cloud goes up in smoke

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Syntax Error:
If you don't already have a disaster recovery plan for your web site, web service and mailboxes, maybe you should start thinking about having one. 555 > Internal server fire

--- Quote ---PARIS (Reuters) - A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.

https://www.reuters.com/article/france-ovh-fire/update-1-fire-destroys-servers-at-french-data-company-ovhcloud-idUSL1N2L80FR

--- End quote ---

SilverSolder:

Yeah, another downside of the "all eggs in a few baskets" cloud approach.

The convenience comes at a cost...

Halcyon:
Wouldn't that be poor planning on the DC operator?

For someone like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, I'm sure if a DC or two went down, they would have high-availability in place so that downtime is minimal.

Nominal Animal:
As an OVH customer myself, I agree with Halcyon.  (The services I pay for were not affected, though.)

Unless it turns out it was not an accident, I do believe OVH dropped the ball here.  The loss of a single rack is always possible, but proper automatic halon extinguishing systems should have stopped the fire.  Apparently, it destroyed one hall, and partially spread to another hall.

hamster_nz:
This is why proper 'clouds' have availability regions and availability zone. Most cloud providers don't promise 100% availability - it's the customer's responsibility to architect their systems correctly for the availability and redundancy they need.

Gaseous fire suppression are not really practical in 'warehouse scale' data centers.... when triggered the rise in air pressure can literally blow the roof off or walls out, and the systems themselves present a risk (lots of gas in high pressure cylinders). Nor is localized inert gas fire suppression effective in Data Centers as they often don't have confined spaces and the have lots of fans and chillers moving air around to cool the equipment.

In a lot of cases it's good site practices (e.g. no cardboard/paper, good cable management, hotwork processes, regular inspection with IR cameras), VESDA, temperature monitoring, and finally well-trained people with fire extinguishers as the last line of defense.

Sure, you can engineer up to it, but having a workable BCP costs less.

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