OVH says some customer data and configs can’t be recovered after fire, some seems to be OK, plenty is safe

Data centres are on track for restoration from March 22nd and more than 3,500 new servers already secured

There’s good news and bad news for customers of French cloud operator OVH.

The good is that it has backups of some systems impacted by last week’s fire that destroyed one of its four data centres in the French city of Strasbourg.

The bad news is that it doesn’t have backups of some systems impacted by last week’s fire that, is yet to determine if it has viable backups for plenty of services and can’t be sure that it has backups for some services it has classified as “recoverable”.

The company has published a status page that says the following services are unrecoverable based on OVH’s assessment of its internal backups:

• Plesk
• NAS-HA storage
• Datastore
• vRops
• Managed Veeam Backup (Local DC) in SBG 1 and 2
• Virtual private servers in some OpenStack zones
• VPS Snapshot Cloud
• Monthly public cloud instances in some OpenStack zones
• EG-HG-SP Backup Instance
• Public Cloud Archive (PCA)
• Public Block Storage (Ceph)

The company has also offered an update restoration timeline that reveals SBG1, the data centre that was partially destroyed, had electricity restored temporarily on March 13th. Permanent power restoration is expected on March 17th and the data centre’s internal network will be restored on the same day.

Servers are provisionally scheduled to be spun up on March 22nd for what OVH calls a “gradual restart”.

SBG3, in which no servers were damaged, did need to be dried out and OVH said that should be completed by Sunday night. Cleaning soot from the data centre will begin on March 16th, followed by restoration of internal networks a day later. March 22nd is its return to service date.

SBG4, also untouched, gets power and networks on the 17th and gradual restart from March 22nd.

The cloudy concern has also revealed that it’s received over 3,500 new servers and almost 2,000 terabytes of storage, and an on-site team of 60 is working in shifts around the clock to get the cloud back up to speed.

OVH founder Octave Klaba has hinted that work is going well.

Update March 14, 1pm
3/3
60 tech work on the site. Still lot of to do, but it’s going faster than expected. We keep the same ETA and maybe we will be faster.

A webpage with the final state of:
- primary data
- internal backup (not contractual)
- service backup
is in progress.

— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 14, 2021

The cloudy company has also started to issue service credits to customers impacted by the blaze, and suspended billing too.

No further assessment of what caused the fire has been offered. ®