Re:Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building
by jacquesm on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @02:49AM
(#26408872)
It's true: most companies do not have a disaster recovery plan, and many of them confuse a breach protocol with a disaster recovery plan ('we have backups').
Fires in DCs aren't rare at all, I know of at least three, one of those in a building where I had servers. This one seems to be worse than the other two. Datacenters tend to concentrate a lot of flammable stuff, throws a ton of current through them and does so 24x7. The risk of a fire is definitely not imaginary, which is why most DCs have fire suppression mechanisms. Whether those work as advertised depends on the nature of the fire. An exploding on prem transformer took out a good chunk of EV1's datacenter in the early 2000's, and it wasn't so much the fire that caused problems for their customers, but the fact that someone got injured (or even died, I don't recall exactly), and before the investigation was completed and the DC released to the owners again took a long time.
Being paranoid and having off-site backups is what allowed us to be back online before the fire was out. If not for that I don't know if our company would have survived.
Fires in DCs aren't rare at all, I know of at least three, one of those in a building where I had servers. This one seems to be worse than the other two. Datacenters tend to concentrate a lot of flammable stuff, throws a ton of current through them and does so 24x7. The risk of a fire is definitely not imaginary, which is why most DCs have fire suppression mechanisms. Whether those work as advertised depends on the nature of the fire. An exploding on prem transformer took out a good chunk of EV1's datacenter in the early 2000's, and it wasn't so much the fire that caused problems for their customers, but the fact that someone got injured (or even died, I don't recall exactly), and before the investigation was completed and the DC released to the owners again took a long time.
Being paranoid and having off-site backups is what allowed us to be back online before the fire was out. If not for that I don't know if our company would have survived.