Close blinds, release NOVEC, disable power rails to computers. That's all. It might not stop everything, but it can help a lot.
<virtue B>
Affordable.
Pick two.
Unless you assume other people's money is unlimited (which is the accepted industry standard for online discourse related to subjects such as safety and reliability) there will always be tradeoffs.
It's really easy to make low effort comments about the right balance being obvious when you're defining the right choice as "literally any balance of factors that does not recreate the precise set of circumstances that lead to the events that spurned this discussion."
Also, Chinese build solid DC buildings out of containers. It's indeed possible.
Glad to have left that company years before the fire, never doing business with them ever again.
What alternatives are there? Not many good ones at a comparable price point. (Yeah I know about online.net, Hetzner and so on. OVH offers a much more polished product and vastly better network)
At the prices OVH offers, you can have your servers replicated in multiple datacenters for less money than many DCs would charge you for a single server with the same specs.
At this price point it should be perfectly fine if a datacenter burns down occasionally. At least their network is otherwise very reliable.
See my post here of how they are jacking prices up: https://rorodi.substack.com/p/sorry-but-due-to-the-high-cost...
Why wouldn't you mention them? Is it generic clickbait, and you don't want to get sued?
The big one (that did cause considerable consternation) was Hetzner some weeks ago, though they are based in Germany not France. See https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/176802/hetzner-price-incre... for much complaining about that one.
As the problems causing price increases for power continue, I expect many cheap providers (who have very low margins so can't afford not to pass on significant increases in power costs), and larger outfits with budget lines, will have to change prices soon or fail.
That depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for sustainable options, this probably doesn't include companies that burn down datacenters.
You would need to use multiple locations, not just datacenters, for durability. The network performance between locations just isn't as good as between datacenters in the same location.
IME OVH also offers much better connectivity around the world (which makes sense, given that they operate at a much larger scale than Hetzner)
Oh, and Hetzner billing support is absolutely terrible. I had to fight with them for months to stop charging for servers which had already been cancelled, after tens of emails they eventually owned up to having a bug on their end. It was like talking to a wall.
With Hetzner on the other hand I've had technical support issues responded to adequately within two hours, multiple times. As a small individual customer no less.
Hetzner has very good technical support, definitely no complaints about that. It’s their billing department which is downright unpleasant to work with.
I also had several outages with OVH (Exchange and Dedicated Server) - none yet with Hetzner. Right now planning to finally leave OVH for Hetzner and Microsoft (Exchange)
Note that OVH is primarily focused on dedicated servers, a VPS host isn’t comparable.
It would be strange to expect them to deal with the situation any differently if there was a catastrophic event in one of their DCs resulting in destroyed servers.
When working with dedicated servers at this price point, you’re very much expected to deal with your own backups.
Edit: To clarify, they are claiming generic compliance with for example ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 et 27018. Does not look like it from the incident report. Maybe only some of their offers, and that is the detail I am referring to.
https://www.lne.fr/recherche-certificats/data_certificats/37...
The SOA date and the effective date of the certificate are posterior to the fire incident in question.
OVH SBG1, SBG2 and SBG3 were all at: Rue du Bassin de l'Industrie, 67000 Strasbourg, France.
The addendum to that document says is only related to activities on the sites mentioned. The address Rue du Bassin de l'Industrie, 67000 Strasbourg is listed, so sounds like they have now addressed the issues.
OVH was only a renter. First I would blame local fire department for not enforcing their fire codes.
Those put their operation into a place must ascertein that the location can withstand the operations and its risks. Even renting a flat put limits on your activity in the contract, what you can or cannot do there.
If they requested the proper fire rating and safety measures then it is not their mistake being deceived. Otherwise it is.
If someone wants to burn down their own property, why not let them? That's up to the business and their insurance to judge.
Are they talking about the lack of an EOD or something more fundamental to the power system? It almost seems like you need something external to the facility in case of a fire where it's unsafe to enter the building.
Love your faith in humanity but I think we'd both be surprised about how little other hosting providers have changed after this incident.
Freeflowing does not excuse not having proper auto-closing dampers, triggered by the fire alarms or suppression system.
Automatic power disconnects based on fire suppression system triggering are pretty standard. Most of the systems are fail-safe, meaning if the fire suppression panel loses power or is disconnected from the breakers feeding the room, the breakers trip off.
That there were no automatic shutoffs or easily accessible breakers to disable the generators is shocking. Most NOCs I've visited, there are remote genset controls on one of the walls, often remote transfer switch controls as well. At the very least, on the way out the door someone in the NOC should have pushed the right buttons.
I've never even heard of a commercial datacenter that didn't have fire suppression. Some companies go for preaction systems to reduce the chances of a "everything gets completely fucked by water" systems (gaseous systems are the gold standard, hugely expensive to install compared to water.)
They had wood ceilings!?
In my career in the US, I've been around numerous situations where it was pretty obvious the fire inspector was being paid off or at the very least had an extremely cordial relationship with the building management. My guess is that something similar was happening here.
I don't understand how they managed to have insurance, or get the ISO certifications they claimed they had.
What fire department didn't do the walkthrough? Here that is obligatory and when that happens you can be sure that even a carton sti left from the newest installation is reprimanded.
The last room I took take of was accepted with protocol by an architect. The carpenter and electrition had to explain every single change they made and justify that fire protection was reasonable (e.g. if necessary an extra layer of plasterboard and plaster on every small bit that could ignite was mandatory to gain an est. 30min on top here and there)
ISO: what apart from documentation is necessary for ISO? What Standard are you referring to?
Apart from Host Europe in Nottingham who no longer exist there AFAIK. That was worse than OVH.
This OVH DC was designed to a cost rather than a safety specification and the risk did not pay off.
what leads you to say that? just curious
From the report (not the post): something that really annoyed the firemen is that not only was there no universal electrical cut-off, there were 4 different electrical backups, which they had to figure out how to cut off one by one...
It's the same thing as the self-cooling design: OVH optimized for what typically matters in a DC. You want an energy-efficient design and you never want power to go down.
Well... except when you do. I suppose by now them and other hosting providers have taken that issue into account and are modifying their DC designs accordingly.