Still not all OVHcloud services back online

Still not all OVHcloud services back online

Hosting provider OVHcloud is still recovering from the fire that destroyed two of its data centres. More than a month after the fire, there are still customers whose services have not been restored yet.

Recovering from the fire is a real nightmare, says OVH CEO Octave Klaba in a tweet. After a data centre in Strasbourg (SBG2) burnt down completely in early March and a neighbouring data centre (SBG1) was so badly damaged that the company felt compelled to permanently write off that data centre as well, OVH has been busy restoring its services.

Huge operation

The company is trying to recover as much hardware from SBG1 as possible that survived the fire. However, the parts must be cleaned one by one, which is a labour-intensive process. It takes seven hours per server rack, although OVH employees are getting faster at it.

What’s more, it was already a major logistical undertaking to get employees on site, to house them and to feed them. The corona pandemic is not making things any easier either. Once the hardware has been cleaned, all the components are moved to SBG3 and reassembled, which Klaba describes as a giant game of Tetris.

Still no recovery timeline

In a latest update on the status of services, OVH says 92 percent of Bare Metal servers have been delivered back to customers, 86 percent of Public Cloud Instances have been replaced, 99 percent of Public Cloud Storage has been replaced, 79 percent of Hosted Private Cloud services are running again and 84 percent of Bare Metal Cloud has been replaced. Some of the services have been restored to locations elsewhere in France.

It is not known when all OVH services will be back online. In the meantime, OVH is working on vouchers for customers who have been affected by the fire. Of course, the customers will not have to pay for services that were offline due to the fire.

Tip: OVH fire may be caused by faulty UPS