OVHcloud has restored power to three data remaining centres in Strasbourg.

This development comes in the wake of one of its facilities in Strasbourg, France, which was ravaged by a fire a few days back.

According to a tweet from OVHcloud Founder and CEO Octave Klaba, the cloud provider is restoring power to the three remaining data centers on the site, SBG1, SBG3, and SBG4 according to its planned schedule. Users who have lost servers are being offered free replacements in the company’s Roubaix facility, the cloud provider said. Klaba also explained that restarting of the servers – the servers in some rooms have to be cleaned up because of the smoke.

“At least SBG3/Floor4+5, SBG1/61E+62E – all others servers have to be inspected for the pollution risks – check for water cooling and then start booting,” he said.

Klaba also in a video message, attributed the catastrophic fire to shoddy maintenance work on some UPSes as one of the reasons, which resulted in millions of websites going offline. OVH is Europe’s largest hosting provider and the third-largest globally with 32 data centres in OVHcloud’s global network.

Further, in the video message, Klaba explained that the fire completely destroyed the SBG2 data center, with four rooms of SBG1 that were close by were also lost in the inferno. Klaba said that by the time its staff responded to the fire alarms, the facility was already engulfed in smoke.

When the fire department responded, they also bought thermic cameras, which allowed them to see through the smoke and spot the two UPSes that were on fire, he stated. Further, Klaba pointed out that one of these particular UPSes had been repaired a day earlier and was pushed back into active service in the afternoon before the day of the fire.

“However, the other eight rooms of SBG1, along with the two other data centers, namely SBG3 and SBG4, are completely unharmed,” he said.

Klaba also pointed out that the gutted SBG2 data centre has over 300 security cameras and the team is working to retrieve and comb through to determine the culpability for the event.

This development could cause a minor hiccup in the cloud service providers’ plans to go for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in Paris. In the event of catastrophies like this, investors generally tend to go cautious when it comes to investing. The company has to get back on its feet faster in such an event as clients may go to competitors,” said an analyst from an India-based brokerage firm.

Most organizations have a three to five-level contingency plan, ranging from pre-pandemic) operations, to taking reasonable precautions, through lights-out operation and, in worst cases, a complete site shutdown with transfer of critical applications and operations to backup sites, noted Hideaki Fujimaki, CEO, Spiralgroup.biz Ltd.

You can read more at https://w.media/how-dcs-should-plan-in-a-pandemic/

Recently, as a part of its global growth strategy, OVHcloud has opened its second data centre in Sydney and doubled its data centre capacity in Singapore. Both these announcements follow its announcement of a new Point of Presence infrastructure deployed in Mumbai, India earlier this year.