Bas-Rhin fire department just completed the investigation of the devastating fire accident that destroyed the OVHcloud SBG2 data center in Strasbourg last year. According to the report, the data center has a considerable number of fire hazards – including the wooden ceiling with a nominal fire resistance of only one hour, no automatic fire extinguishing device, and no general electric cut-off switch. However, what is more regrettable for firefighters is that the “natural cooling design” of this facility creates a “chimney” effect that can increase the fire.
Incident review
On March 10, 2021, a serious fire broke out in the computer room of European cloud computing giant OVH in Strasbourg, France. A total of four data centers (Strasbourg Data Center) in this area. The SBG2 data center that caught fire was completely burned down, and part of the building of another data center SBG1 was damaged. For security reasons, all OVH data centers in Strasbourg were closed at that time.
OVH has 27 data centers in Europe, North America and Asia. In addition to AWS, Microsoft azure and Google cloud, OVH is one of the largest web hosting service providers in the world, and is even regarded by many people as the hope of the European hosting service industry. The fire completely destroyed the five storey SBG2 data center covering an area of 500 square meters, and caused damage to adjacent SBG1 servers. However, firefighters arrived in time to protect SBG3 and SBG4 from impact.
How to reduce the impact of such disasters on your business?
All company information must be protected and accessible at all times in order to survive and grow better. In view of this, the significance of the safeguard cannot be underestimated. However, although backing up important data is an integral part of an organization’s IT strategy, businesses cannot ignore backup or disaster recovery. If it takes hours to recover lost data after accidental deletion, employees, customers or partners of the enterprise will not be able to access important data, preventing them from completing business critical processes that rely on it.
If it takes several days to put the business back online after the disaster, customers and business income may be permanently lost. Given that a significant amount of time and costs can be lost in both of these cases, the companies’ investment in disaster relief and recovery is completely reasonable.
For most enterprises, don’t wait for disaster. Backup and disaster recovery strategies are critical to sustaining the future of the business. Enterprises must solve the problem of it recovery by creating a comprehensive solution that includes people, processes and technology. Backup and disaster recovery plans can be helpful only if they are designed, deployed, and tested before they are needed.
By using Vinchin Backup & Recovery, you can instantly recover the entire VM and all its data from any restore point (no matter if it’s a full backup, incremental backup, or differential backup) without any effect on the original backup data. Any deduplicated or compressed backups can be recovered. It is an excellent solution to ensure business continuity and minimize the loss of crucial business interruptions caused by disaster or system failure.
You can also quickly verify the backup data availability by instantly recovering the target VM to an isolated area in a matter of minutes. Make sure when a real disaster occurs, all the VMs can be recovered and the data inside is not lost or damaged. Vinchin supports the world’s most mainstream virtual environments and provides solutions such as VMware backup, XenServer/XCP-ng backup, Hyper-V backup, RHV/oVirt backup, etc
