OVH, Europe’s largest web hosting provider (opens in new tab) still hasn’t fully recovered from a catastrophic fire (opens in new tab) in one of its data centers in Strasbourg, France.
OVH (opens in new tab) Co-founder and CTO Octave Klaba has pinned the blame on pandemic-related challenges that have made an already complex task a “real nightmare.”
A major fire ravaged through one of its four buildings in OVH's Strasbourg facility in March 2021, completely destroying one (SBG2), with the company also losing another facility (opens in new tab) (SBG1) in the following weeks after attempts to restart it.
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Tetris-esque
While the facility was written off, a majority of the servers it housed were perfectly unharmed, but needed to be tested before they could be moved to another building (SBG3).
Smoke and soot have penetrated several servers, which need to be taken apart and cleaned, before they can be tested and pushed back into active duty. OVH said it takes their crews about seven hours to clean a server, though they are getting more efficient.
In a tweet Klaba likened the process of cleaning and shifting server racks, while assembling new ones, to a game of Tetris.
As per the last official available status update posted on OVH’s website on April 12, a majority of the cloud hosting services (opens in new tab) run from the Strasbourg facilities have either been restored or replaced.
The company has already announced plans to offer a comprehensive backup policy for free to all its clients, following news that it can’t recover data (opens in new tab) from the backups (opens in new tab) of some of its customers, who hadn’t contracted the company for keeping them in the first place.
They’ve also stopped billing customers whose services were impacted due to the incident, and wouldn’t be charging them for any new orders placed as replacements.
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Via: The Register (opens in new tab)
