OVH founder Octave Klaba has posted some new updates on the status of the burnt down data centres. The company is busy cleaning up hardware in the hope of refurbishing as many parts as possible.
On Twitter, Klaba shows several photos of how parts that were not directly affected by the fire, but have been in contact with smoke, are being cleaned. He says the smoke is very corrosive and the equipment would break down immediately if activated without cleaning.
Cleaning takes time
The process of cleaning could take several days, as it is a labour-intensive job that also needs to be done carefully. According to Klobe, the cleaning process progresses at the rate of three server racks per day. During the cleaning and moving of the servers, OVH employees also encounter other problems, such as a lift that is out of order. Because of this, the servers have to be lugged up the stairs.
OVH hopes to restart more and more servers from SBG1 that survived the fire in SBG3 and SBG4 over the course of the week. It has already fully restarted SBG4 and SBG3 is almost completely up and running again.
Two data centres written off
A few weeks ago, a fire broke out in a data centre belonging to hosting provider OVHcloud in Strasbourg. The data centre, named SBG2, completely burned down. The neighbouring data centre SBG1 also suffered considerable fire damage. That data centre was also written off after new smoke came up weeks later. OVH did manage to save some equipment there. SBG3 and SBG4 were unharmed but were also shut down as a precaution. The fire appeared to be caused by a faulty UPS, which had received maintenance the day before.
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