OVHcloud Data Center Fire: Business Recovery Status Updates -

A fire has destroyed an OVHcloud data center in Strasbourg, France and partly damaged a second data center. The result: Millions of websites are offline -- including businesses and government agencies across France, Reuters reports.

The OVHcloud disaster recovery effort sounds massive. Indeed, the cloud service provider (CSP) plans to launch "nearly 10,000 new servers in the coming weeks" to restore customers from the outage, the cloud service provider (CSP) disclosed on its OVHcloud System Status Page.

The OVHcloud fire and resulting business outages raise new questions about cloud business continuity. As thousands of OVHcloud customers and MSP partners are now learning, there are risks associated with running a business in a single third-party data center without redundancies to at least one more data center in a separate region.

OVHcloud Fire: Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan

Amid the fire and businesses outages, OVHcloud's three disaster recovery priorities are:

Reserve infrastructures at our other data centers for our affected customers: we have a stock of new servers at the Roubaix and Gravelines sites, ready to be delivered to the majority of affected customers. We will further enhance availability in these data centers, with the production of nearly 10,000 new servers in the coming weeks. Affected customers will be notified about this process as soon as possible.
Secure the site now that we have regained access, clean it up, and reconnect the electricity and the network for the three affected data centers.
Continue to assess the impact on our customers’ servers at the affected data centers, in order to find the best solutions.

The list above is based on the OVHcloud System Status Page as of March 11, 2021.

OVHcloud is a major cloud service provider and data center alternative to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The company specializes in VMware-centric workloads, and has 32 data centers across four continents.