What we can learn from the fire in the OVH data center
No time right now?
The major fire at one of the largest cloud hosters is more than just an accident in a data center. It is a case that raises many questions about the value and reliance on a technology.
Last week, Europe’s largest cloud provider burned a five-story data center with 12,000 servers. At OVH-Cloud in Strasbourg, four server halls were destroyed, one burned down completely. This went loud Media reports 3.6 million websites temporarily offline, including government institutions, banks, large law firms, but also large game providers such as Facepunch and many more.
Part of the data was completely destroyed because not all customers had the (paid) backups offered by OVH-Cloud. Usually, as an expert from another cloud provider explains, backups by the provider are part of a shared cloud, but with dedicated servers it is the responsibility of the customer. A thrift that in a specific case can be really expensive for the company concerned.
Now there are increasing voices saying that the cloud is not secure and that you would be better off keeping your data in your own data center. But that’s wrong for several reasons.
On the one hand, a cloud infrastructure, regardless of which of the major providers (Amazon’s AWS Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, Google Cloud) can be maintained without any problems in such a way that there is not only sufficient redundancy for the backups, but also at different locations to be created. On the other hand, it is still up to the customer to either take care of backups himself or to let the cloud provider do this (and that would actually be the more elegant solution). Strictly speaking, in the event of such a fire, the cloud provider must then also pull another backup from the remote backup at a third location in order to achieve redundancy again.
OVH fire: a chain of unfortunate circumstances
In the case of the OVH fire, several points should have come together at the same time. In the data center, for example, there was probably plenty of wood built into both the floor and the scaffolding – not a really common environment and certainly not an optimal one. In addition, be so explains Octave Klaba, Head of the host OVH Cloud, apparently two uninterruptible power supplies caught fire very early on. According to Klaba, it could be that the fire started here – the fire brigade and insurance company have yet to clarify the details. Apparently it was also about fire alarms that are not automatically networked with the fire brigade – this is different in many other cloud data centers, for example, but (according to an expert from a competitor) anything but unusual.
images also show that standard sprinkler systems were used in the cloud data center. In many other data centers, however, sprinkler systems are used to protect the servers instead of literally flooding them. In addition, the fire brigade must have withdrawn from the data center very quickly, as unusually heavy smoke prevented the extinguishing. It is still unclear why the combination of a fire alarm and an aspirating smoke early warning system (VESDA) did not ensure that the fire was extinguished promptly and could not spread in the first place.
An argument against data storage in the cloud?
The fact that such damage was caused by OVH as the largest hoster in Europe with around 260,000 servers in almost two dozen data centers shows how vulnerable the cloud is despite all the suggested data security. This is less due to their basic idea, but more to the cost-cutting measures of some (even larger) companies.
The case also shows that binding rules and standards must be established that not only enable companies to be held accountable, but also ensure, in case of doubt, that really relevant data, for example from the public sector, cannot so easily vanish into thin air. Because that can happen – regardless of on-premises storage or multi-cloud strategy – in a wide variety of infrastructure combinations. OVH-Cloud is also one of the hopes for Gaia-X, a European answer to the cloud offerings of the Internet giants from the USA and China. The company is expected to go public soon and industry experts spoke of a company value in the billions, at least before the incident.
