Zero Sowebio Clients Impacted
We fully renew our trust in OVH during this challenging time, through our servers hosted at OVH in Gravelines GRA2, Roubaix RBX5 & RBX8, and… Strasbourg SBG2. Zero clients impacted thanks to our high-availability Genesix cluster, developed in-house and built on the best free systems, software, and programming languages.
The Facts – The Day After
Yesterday, Wednesday March 10, shortly after midnight, a fire was detected in SBG2, OVH’s Data Center #2 in Strasbourg. Firefighters began their intervention around 12:30 a.m. They fought successfully to protect the adjacent SBG1 and SBG3. Two-thirds of SBG1 were spared.
SBG3 remained intact—remarkable given the layout of the site. Congratulations to the 115 firefighters from SDIS 67, who deployed 44 vehicles, a drone, and the Franco-German fireboat Europa 1 to contain this complex blaze and also save SBG4 and the brand new SBG5, which was still being outfitted.
Initial Responses
SBG1 and SBG4 are expected to restart next Monday, March 14. SBG3 is expected to come back online around Friday, March 19, followed by several weeks of major work (including a full overhaul and 20 KV power line inspections).
Sowebio has a major 16 TB server hosted on SBG3. It is, of course, currently offline as the site has no power supply. However, all hosted virtual machines and associated critical functions were running under High Availability, with a private 2 Gbps OVH fiber link to our servers at GRA2 Gravelines, RBX5, and RBX8 Roubaix, through our Genesix high-availability cluster manager, developed by Sowebio in HAC, a subset of Ada that is both interpretable and compilable.
15,000 (!) servers are expected to be reinstalled in the coming weeks, thanks to OVH’s in-house server manufacturing plant located in Croix, part of the Lille metropolitan area. This plant, employing nearly 130 people over almost 15,000 m², houses four robotic assembly lines capable of producing over 100,000 servers per year, with expansion capacity of up to half a million servers annually.
Conclusion
Data center fires are extremely violent. The spread is incredibly fast, and the heat released is enormous, causing exponential propagation through spontaneous combustion of surrounding materials.
According to monitoring data, some servers were still operating at 88°C ambient temperature before monitoring was cut—further evidence, albeit under dramatic circumstances, of OVH’s server quality.
Our thoughts go out to all SysAdmins and businesses impacted by this disaster.
Our continued support to Octave Klaba and the entire OVH team, who are working tirelessly to restore services as quickly as possible. OVH will overcome this fire and continue to deliver the excellence of French Tech.
Already, hats off for the quick response and transparent communication (a tradition of the company). Sowebio stands with OVH 200%!
