
A major incident in one of the data centers in France – OVH caused massive downtime and potential data loss for many customers as per the reports in Data Center World.
“On Wednesday, 10 March 2021 a fire broke out in a room at the SBG-2 OVHcloud data center in Strasbourg, France. The fire reportedly destroyed SBG-2 and damaged four of 12 rooms in the adjacent SBG-1 data center. Two adjacent data centers, SBG-3 and SBG-4, were not damaged but were shut down during the event, requiring a massive, time-consuming reboot of all their systems.”
As per the reports even after 14 days of this event, they are still struggling to bring customer services online. This might be due to the volume of the impacted hardware items and the amount of data.
Today myself together with our CTO Daniel Ananthan who is a specialist in data center design thought of exploring this incident so that all of our readers could learn from this incident.
As more and more applications, databases moving to the cloud and organizations adopting the cloud first approach towards their business organizations are becoming more dependent on CSPs. CSPs are becoming a critical element in business continuity. Even the most mature CSPs such as AWS and Azure have undergone large service outages.
What should CIOs do to minimize the impact on such outages ?
Reviewing the Service Level agreements and the business impact assessments would be an important future activity for CIOs. If you are dependent on cloud service providers for hosting business critical systems you would have to review the below elements of the Service Levels
Having said that there are many organizations which are dependent on Data centers for their services. They run business critical data centers and might not be able to move to a cloud native architecture in near future. How could such customers who have on prem data centers or using Colocation facilities minimize the impact of such data center outages ?
Our CTO Daniel Ananthan highlights a few important points.
VS ONE is helping a number of clients optimize their data centers with our data center advisory services. This involves multiple assignments including analysis of the existing power, cooling arrangements, Identification of data center hotspots, analyzing the Fire controls including fire alarms and fire suppression solutions.
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Sadeepa Palliyaguru
Sadeepa is the Director / Chief Innovation Officer of VS ONE where he also specializes in Public Cloud Solutions and Information Security. He has over 10 years of experience in Software Development and Strategic Consulting and is also skilled in Technical Communication and Enterprise Systems. As a Solutions Architect, he has been instrumental in the design and development of multiple cloud and Software defined infrastructure solutions in Sri Lanka and overseas |