[HN Gopher] OVH CEO Octave Klaba apologizes and provides updates...
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OVH CEO Octave Klaba apologizes and provides updates about SBG2
Author : netgusto
Score : 146 points
Date : 2021-03-12 08:34 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ovh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ovh.com)
| aritmo wrote:
| The video was badly prepared. He was talking about datacentre
| names as if the audience are his own employees and are fully
| aware of the different buildings. He could at least have some
| graphics.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It certainly wasn't well prepared. But it did everything there
| is to be done in such a situation. An quick apology, details
| about the situation, and what is being done. I didn't have any
| problem understanding what was being said. I don't know the
| details about the buildings but I don't think it is necessary
| to understand the general idea. Datacenter caught fire and was
| completely destroyed, some damage in the surrounding buildings,
| old buildings are worse than new buildings.
|
| A nice presentation would have been great, but if there is a
| choice, I'd rather have the CEO work on the problem than polish
| his presentation.
|
| Edit: He also named some people. I don't know who they are, I
| can only guess they are employees, and while I don't really
| care personally, I think it is tasteful to name them since they
| did the right thing by intervening quickly and not being
| reckless.
| lovedswain wrote:
| As a customer I understood the video perfectly. Those names
| appear on every invoice and during every order
| lenartowski wrote:
| And probably you as a customer are a main target of such
| video, but the fire was such a high-profile case (I think)
| that this should be more understandable for general audience.
|
| edit: not sure why I got downvoted (and I don't really care
| that much), I just think that communication from CEO of big
| company after such event should be clear for everyone, not
| only for those directly affected.
| Macha wrote:
| Honestly, nobody lost their lives, the impact is pretty
| much limited to OVH (who need to find a new building),
| their customers (who need to find new servers and restore
| backups), and the city of strasbourg (who run the emergency
| services and presumably will have some involvement in the
| cleanup). While we're all interested in a "Oh, are we
| prepared if that happened to our provider?" sense, I don't
| see why OVH is obliged to provide communications to us,
| rather than to their customers.
| Ploskin wrote:
| But ... the video isn't for a general audience. He doesn't
| have any reason to apologize to a general audience. His
| customers are the only people that matter in this situation
| and this video is for them.
| longcommonname wrote:
| I would expect the communication to be directly targeted to
| customers not the general public.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| OVH deserve points for being one of the only hosting providers
| I know that make their entire network weathermap available to
| the public, showing all their global interconnects and then
| letting you channel it down to a per-DC level:
| http://weathermap.ovh.net/#europe
| yardstick wrote:
| Interesting. Are there popular tools to build such diagrams
| or is this a bespoke creation? ie are they using
| scripts+graphviz directly or is there some middlewear doing
| things?
| imbusy111 wrote:
| The worst thing, in my opinion, is that there has been no
| communication from OVH directly to their customers. I am impacted
| and I have not received a single e-mail about the situation even
| now.
| puxedo wrote:
| Same in my case. No communication. Generally they are good with
| any networking issues, attacks, etc.
|
| In this case nothing apart from the banner on the dashboard.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Octave has been putting out daily messages on twitter to
| customers explaining the situation.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Did the fire take out their database of customer emails too?
| duxup wrote:
| Man I hate how that works.
|
| I'll want to know what is going on with a thing and find out
| "oh they mostly post that kind of news on twitter" or "oh
| this person uses instagram", or "that news goes out via
| email", or youtube ... or ... who knows where ...
|
| Like guises come on, where am I supposed to get information
| when you're using like 8 different channels and not
| consistently...
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| This raises the question, "How could Octave be so tone-
| deaf?"
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Only for people who want this incident to be part of a
| grand story arc about the character of OVH. The
| communication has been fine.
| fshr wrote:
| Should they be sending emails? Yes, of course. But, you're
| being hyperbolic. It's always, otherwise, Twitter or a
| status page on their website.
| rubenbe wrote:
| I did get an email yesterday around 16h00 GMT. It was pretty
| generic, the only new thing it contained (for me at least) was
| the FAQ regarding this incident.
|
| https://help.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/faq/strasbourg-incident/?xto...
| karmakaze wrote:
| Following some links, I saw SBG1 and SBG4: we
| are planning to bring these datacentres and the network room
| onlinenext week. SBG3: we are planning to bring this
| datacentre online in 1-2 weeks.
|
| I'm not an OVH customer, are these building names? It seems a
| bit confusing that a datacentre doesn't correspond to an
| availability zone or is this typical at large scale?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| SBG is OVH Strasbourg, a complex of data centres that are
| adjacent to each other, but which were not built at the
| same time and are architecturally not the same. Yes, SBG1-4
| are the different buildings. Some of them are made from
| stacked shipping containers, but SBG2 was an actual
| building.
|
| SBG2 basically burned to the ground. The fire also spread
| into SBG1 if I remember correctly: parts of SBG1 were
| destroyed but some parts are intact. SBG3 and 4 are also
| intact. Under the circumstances the entire complex is
| offline at the moment though, which is not surprising given
| the scale of the fire and the firefighter response. The
| photos reminded me of the WTC attack, which shut down lower
| Manhattan for months.
|
| SBG2 was built like a vertical tunnel, a quadrangle of
| server rooms with a huge air shaft in the middle, intended
| to convection-cool the servers through the natural motion
| of the rising air through it as the air was warmed by the
| servers. In this case it may have resulted in something
| like a firestorm, where the fire maintained its own airflow
| through that column.
|
| I'd be interested to know if there is any hope and/or
| intention in this situation to recover possibly-operable
| hard drives from the charred servers for data recovery
| purposes.
|
| I couldn't believe the complaints about the audio in that
| mp4. I could understand him perfectly well except a few
| times his accent got in the way. Better audio wouldn't have
| mattered much.
| ognarb wrote:
| We received a mail. Fortunately we were using the managed
| database service from ovh and could quickly restore our
| websites from a backup.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Their status page was also showing everything being fine in the
| affected datacenter at least until the next day.
| remram wrote:
| I am not directly impacted (not running anything that is
| advertised as physically there) but emails have been taking
| multiple hours to arrive for days. It would be nice to have a
| way of knowing whether I should change my MX servers or not.
|
| I think it's fine for them to take some time to fix their
| infrastructure, but if they could let me know, I can easily
| work around it. Incoming email is kind of difficult to monitor
| and _needs_ to work...
|
| [edit] 3 separate tickets in 3 days... it seems dishonest to
| keep opening/closing them rather than let us know the infra is
| unreliable for the foreseeable future
| http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=49451&
| http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=49504&
| http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=49530&
| codezero wrote:
| maybe all their email systems were in that building, not even
| joking
| mooneater wrote:
| He looks as exactly as stressed out and sleep deprived as you
| might expect given the circumstances.
| progval wrote:
| duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427960
| SirSavary wrote:
| OVH wiped my server a couple weeks ago for non-payment while I
| was in the middle of a support ticket to sort out a billing issue
| with my invoice.
|
| Was asked for more information from a support rep. Server was
| auto-wiped less than an hour later.
|
| Ended an eleven year relationship and after this fire I can't
| recommend them in good faith to anyone.
| serverlessbird wrote:
| Had the same shit with them few months ago and also have
| troubles with load balancing. I am on the step of choosing a
| new provider. You still with OVH? Maybe you could recommend
| something you really confident in. I am choosing between
| Constellix (https://constellix.com/) and Azure
| (https://azure.microsoft.com/) now... Pros, cons?
| cyberlab wrote:
| I'm glad they compartment their data centers. Having one data
| center for everything would be a big fail. I say this because you
| would be surprised at how many cloud services centralize
| everything in one spot.
| remram wrote:
| Most cloud providers have availability regions and zones, with
| some services specifically having multi-region/multi-zone
| options (usually with extra cost). Is there any provider that
| hides this?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They shouldn't advertise as 'cloud' then. I know it's a
| marketing buzzword and no guarantee for redundancy or anything,
| but still.
|
| a 'cloud' provider should have, at the very least, multiple
| redundant datacenters in one availability zone.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That's why you have multiple availability zones. Those are
| the physically separate locations that you have visibility
| into and can spread your infrastructure across. Having
| multiple data centers in a single availability without
| visibility into where your systems are is fairly useless. And
| if you do have visibility then you now simply have more
| availability zones so why bother renaming things.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Literally no cloud does that. An availability zone is pretty
| much by definition a single point of failure, and you need to
| architect accordingly.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-03-12 23:02 UTC)