OVH CEO Octave Klaba apologizes and provides updates about SBG2

https://www.ovh.com/fr/images/sbg/index-en.html

by netgusto • 5 years ago

148 35 5 years ago

progval• 5 years ago

duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427960

imbusy111• 5 years ago

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.

ognarb• 5 years ago

We received a mail. Fortunately we were using the managed database service from ovh and could quickly restore our websites from a backup.

puxedo• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Octave has been putting out daily messages on twitter to customers explaining the situation.

duxup• 5 years ago

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...

aaomidi• 5 years ago

Did the fire take out their database of customer emails too?

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

Their status page was also showing everything being fine in the affected datacenter at least until the next day.

rubenbe• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

remram2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

maybe all their email systems were in that building, not even joking

aritmo• 5 years ago

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.

lovedswain• 5 years ago

As a customer I understood the video perfectly. Those names appear on every invoice and during every order

lenartowski• 5 years ago

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.

BuildTheRobots• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

GuB-42• 5 years ago

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.

cyberlab• 5 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

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.

Clewza313• 5 years ago

Literally no cloud does that. An availability zone is pretty much by definition a single point of failure, and you need to architect accordingly.

marcinzm• 5 years ago

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.

remram2• 5 years ago

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?

mooneater• 5 years ago

He looks as exactly as stressed out and sleep deprived as you might expect given the circumstances.

SirSavary• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

OVH CEO Octave Klaba apologizes and provides updates about SBG2

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