[HN Gopher] OVHcloud fire: SBG2 data center had no extinguisher,...
___________________________________________________________________
OVHcloud fire: SBG2 data center had no extinguisher, no power cut-
out
Author : detaro
Score : 388 points
Date : 2022-03-22 08:45 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datacenterdynamics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datacenterdynamics.com)
| 3boll wrote:
| For anyone interested, I maintained a server within the affected
| DC.
|
| OVH provided 3x the price of the service for the downtime. But
| for the recovery we needed to buy a new server from them as our
| backups were only accesible from dedicated machines... At the end
| we basically received 2x the price of the server when discounting
| the temp machine. Communication during the downtime was not bad
| from OVH side, taking into account the huge amount of affected
| servers. At the end, as a small customer I cant do or ask for
| much more. As it's not worth neither the money or the time. IMHO,
| 3x is not covering any business loses for anyone. We got our own
| backups within the OVH network and it took 3 additional days to
| be able to access them as the network was a mess after the fire.
| That for some business is going to be a huge sum.
| hinkley wrote:
| This is the illusion of SLAs. These money-back-guarantees only
| refund the cost of the service. They aren't insurance for loss
| of business.
|
| If I'm using your service for $5k a month and making less than
| $5k a month because of it, my finance people might rightfully
| ask where my head is at. 2x is better than 1x, but in general I
| think we are looking for higher rates of return for that. This
| hardware has to pay for my development and really my entire
| payroll after all.
|
| I also can't trust that you losing $5k an hour motivates you to
| fix the problem ASAP as me losing $5k an hour, let alone if I'm
| losing more than that.
| 3boll wrote:
| Since then I have changed my backup strategy... Now with diff
| providers. Ready for the next fire;)
| toast0 wrote:
| Just a heads up that different providers doesn't always mean
| different buildings. Different cities is more important for a
| physical disaster than different companies. For operational
| disasters (BGP/DNS/accounting error/abuse detection false
| positive/other customer DDoS, etc) different company is
| useful too, of course.
| rosndo wrote:
| With this kind of providers you're kind of expected to have
| your own online backups in order to avoid outages. The price
| point certainly allows for it.
| ksec wrote:
| And now I am wondering if Hetzner has similar problem or if their
| DC are better designed.
|
| In the old days the two are frequently mentioned together.
| nervoustwit wrote:
| "This meant that some OVH customers found that their servers
| continued running after the fire started." So it's not ALL bad
| news.
| nervoustwit wrote:
| "This meant that some OVH customers found that their servers
| continued running after the fire started." It's not ALL bad news.
| cheapzahhh wrote:
| OVH has always been known in France as a super cheap provider run
| by amateurs.
|
| Use it to host a Minecraft server maybe. Use it for anything else
| and you're an idiot.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I wonder if the same corner-cutting happens in the OVHcloud US
| data centers.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| It's a _great_ thing for startups that OVH provides servers at
| such an amazing low cost. Yes, there is always a risk that
| someone will make a mistake in the building design. There 's a
| chance that eliminating some redundancies increases the
| possibility of a failure. There's always a chance that something
| bad will go wrong.
|
| However, this isn't just a matter of Hanlon's razor (incompetence
| vs malice), but more of a matter of an intelligent guesstimate of
| risk versus a lack of knowledge in some areas (wasn't this OVH's
| very first datacenter?), and a strong focus on reducing costs.
| Perhaps the latter went too far, and definitely some obvious
| mistakes were made by not having a universal power cut off of
| some sort, but dealing with the amount of power on tap in a
| datacenter is _always_ dangerous, even when there is _no_ fire at
| all.
|
| I'm not saying we need to give OVH a complete pass on this. I'm
| just saying that there are a lot of extenuating circumstances
| and, except for the power cut off, it's not clear that OVH made
| any choices due to extreme negligence or cost-cutting. In other
| words, they didn't do anything immoral. At worst, it appears that
| (even from the most anti-OVH party here), this was just a mistake
| in the design of a new (at the time) style of datacenter, and it
| did work properly for many years before there was a problem.
| Making a mistake is not immoral.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Everything works well, until not.
|
| When it is worked for years without problem, but also without
| correcting initial sources of risks (learning the business
| after the clueless first years) that's like learning while
| driving that the trunk is full of flammable fluid but driving
| on as "nothing bad happened before".
|
| Buildings should be used within the safety margins of those and
| prepared for certain type of extrimeties, especially fire. We
| do not put risky operations into a construction that could not
| handle or mitigate potential risks (no electricity cutoff, not
| enough fire extunguising material, no cut off of intense
| ventillation). Operating a bakery in a barn without alterations
| comes to mind.
| ddaalluu2 wrote:
| "Amazing low cost"? They're one of the most expensive data
| center operators I know.
|
| Hetzner is about half the price. But neither can have more than
| 3 HDD per machine which is just absurd.
| alexdumitru wrote:
| I have multiple servers at Hetzner with 10 drives each.
| dhx wrote:
| Hetzner Falkenstein was toured recently by a YouTuber and I
| didn't spot any fire suppression systems in the video [1].
| OVH SBG1 (which was partially destroyed by the fire that
| wiped out SBG2) used shipping containers which also didn't
| appear to have any fire suppression systems [2].
|
| By contrast, the typical data centers people know which have
| fire suppression systems appear to have much of their key
| electrical equipment (and control systems) located in the
| same area or adjoining rooms of the same facility [3] [4] [5]
| [6].
|
| In fact, there is even a video recording of a UPS failure [7]
| showing a lucky case where no one was injured and not too
| much damage was caused. The employee lingered in the room
| when they should have immediately left at the first sign of
| danger. Arc flashes are a scary possibility as shown in [8]
| and [9] because of the need to switch multiple megawatts of
| electricity through complex power systems that includes UPS
| battery banks and automatic diesel generators.
|
| There are video recordings demonstrating how fire suppression
| systems work [10] [11] and a description of how a data center
| would be designed to respond to a fire (including closing
| ventilation dampers) [12] [13]. I'm sure fire suppression
| systems are not cheap, but in the grand scheme of a data
| center full of millions of dollars of equipment (not to
| mention cost of customer downtime) surely it would make sense
| to install them.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gua9j4BZKKg
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/qUmLnSEVVDw?t=716
|
| [4] https://youtu.be/LYncuYp0UVo?t=184
|
| [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFtwtvy4Wc
|
| [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGthey0Q1dw
|
| [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhlhj-_7Rrc
|
| [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipW4D0yQyME
|
| [9] https://youtu.be/6hpE5LYj-CY?t=34
|
| [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjii88Jv6AU
|
| [11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZKsKXL-hI
|
| [12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4Jxs3h-3ZU
|
| [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-5fU-ILgo
| Kuinox wrote:
| I pay my OVH potato server 8EUR/month. 2TB SSD, ridiculous
| small CPU, 100MB up/down without any cost.
| pmontra wrote:
| 2TB SSD? Please could you point me to an OVH web page with
| that offer? I looked for it and I didn't find anything.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Woops I meant HDD, can't edit it anymore. Won't make a
| lot of difference, the CPU is so bad it would be your
| bottleneck here. It's a baremetal sever available on
| their lowcost brand: https://www.kimsufi.com/en/
| dspillett wrote:
| _> neither can have more than 3 HDD per machine which is just
| absurd_
|
| Not sure where you get that information from. Some of
| Hetzner's "auction" machines have 10 drives, many of OVH's
| offerings support more than three (even some of the budget
| range, Kimsufi, are 4x2T).
| MikusR wrote:
| From https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-
| rootserver?drives_count_fr... 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSD and 14 x
| 16 TB SATA HDD
| wk_end wrote:
| Where fire's concerned, I do think all mistakes (failure to
| take reasonable precautions, and it sounds like this is the
| case) really are either negligent or immoral. The costs you
| save for yourself and your customers don't factor in the
| externalities that will impact third parties in the event of a
| fire - namely, risk of damage to surrounding property, and risk
| of injury or death for the people who have to put that fire
| out.
| wongarsu wrote:
| In this case at least the neighboring buildings are both from
| OVH as well and the only thing realistically at risk from
| spreading fire is a rail yard.
|
| Of course that doesn't excuse the design at all. Putting
| employees and firefighters at risk isn't ok, and I'm kind of
| baffled that they were allowed to operate like that.
|
| https://www.google.de/maps/@48.5848973,7.7971161,3a,75y,26.0.
| ..
| moralestapia wrote:
| >no general electrical cut-off switch
|
| This is so weird I can hardly believe it, maybe some details were
| lost in the writing.
|
| Were they connecting everything directly to the grid? Even the
| most basic electrical setup goes through a fusebox with switches
| that turn everything on/off.
|
| Perhaps that box was burning as well, or the fire blocked access
| to it, idk. If there truly was no way to cut power from the site
| then, wow, that was just an abysmally stupid decision.
| malfist wrote:
| It said there were meter long electrical arcs in the "power
| room". If I had to guess, I'd guess there was a shutoff in the
| power room, but not one accessible outside of it.
| kelp wrote:
| This does seem crazy to me. I've probably toured 30-40
| datacenter facilities in my career, and they ALWAYS have a big
| red EPO (Emergency Power Off) button at the major exits to each
| datahall. I've been in plenty of facilities all over the US,
| Europe and Japan. (I've also had to deal with the fallout from
| outages caused by someone accidentally pushing that button. I
| think they thought it would open the door. Later on those
| buttons were always covered with a clear plastic housing)
|
| Though never in France and everything I've spent time in was a
| a retail or wholesale provider, eg selling space to other
| companies. Not something owned and operated by a single
| company.
| phire wrote:
| They said they couldn't access the electrical room due to
| electrical arcs (and fire?). That's where the switches and fuse
| boxes would have been located.
|
| What they wanted is a switch outside the building, that could
| cut power to the whole building without having to get to the
| electrical room.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| It wasn't directly plugged into the grid but the report says:
|
| >Aucun organe de coupure externe
|
| Meaning there was no way to cut external power from going into
| the the DC. But the DC also had
|
| >4 niveaux de reprise automatique de courant [very roughly
| translates to "4 layers of automatic power restart"]
|
| Which I guess kept switching the power back on. So the only way
| to completely shut down power was by cutting off the building
| from the grid... with a switch that didn't exist. I don't know
| anything about data centers but that does not make a lot of
| sense to me, why would you want your safety systems to cycle
| back off automatically?
|
| The report also states that the lack of main switch was due to
| "economic decisions made by the company", but does not give
| further details about that multi layered restart system
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Aucun organe de coupure externe
|
| My understanding of this is possibly that "externe" here
| means external as in external _to the building_.
|
| Presumably, there was a breaker - it was just in the same
| room as the fire.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yes exactly! But it seems like the breakers for the
| internal circuits were turned back on repeatedly by
| whatever system was doing a "reprise automatique du
| courant".I guess that means UPS power back ups, but why
| would those not be shut off automatically either by the
| fire alarm or just the breakers? Maybe they weren't, it's
| not really clear, but it's surprising to me that the
| breakers would not cut all current if they are damaged? Do
| fire-safe breakers exist?
| darkwater wrote:
| I think they refer to the absence of _one single mains switch_
| to turn off everything in the datacenter. It took 3 hours for
| the firefighter to find all the individual switches and turn
| them off, according to the report.
| bombcar wrote:
| There still should be a utility box somewhere near, if
| necessary the utility should have been able to kill power to
| the whole sub-division.
|
| Every commercial building in the US I've seen has a big huge
| switch outside (temptation to throw it has been moderate
| sometimes).
|
| The point about UPS continuing to provider power even after
| the utility is cut is critical, though.
| jwandborg wrote:
| Datacenters sometimes have redundant main power providers,
| I'm guessing that could change the assumption to "there
| should be a number of supply boxes nearby, which all need
| to be interfered with".
| bombcar wrote:
| Usually then the boxes are heavily marked with how many
| there are, where the others are, and other info.
| boringg wrote:
| Unrelated tidbit of knowledge i learned yesterday. The first fire
| brigade was created by Julius Caesars partner/general Crassus. He
| put together a team of about 500 people to put out fires that
| happened on a near daily basis in Rome. The catch: he was a land
| speculator who would flip burnt homes on the cheap so his brigade
| would run to a fire but until the owner sold to Crassus on the
| cheap they would watch the home burn.
|
| Talk about a hard nose business or completely unethical leverage,
| wow.
| coopierez wrote:
| Hopefully 2000 years in the future people will talk about the
| US healthcare system with similar incredulity.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Doesn't seem equivalent, since at least treatment for
| immediate medical emergencies is given regardless of ability
| to pay.
| belter wrote:
| Then Nero decided to make a Game Day...
| GreyStache wrote:
| The gallery in the article links to this drone footage I hadn't
| seen before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrGsCD2nVrk
| catwell wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am French and I had servers (well, my employer did,
| and I was the admin) in that DC.
|
| From the report (not the post): something that _really_ annoyed
| the firemen is that not only was there no universal electrical
| cut-off, there were 4 different electrical backups, which they
| had to figure out how to cut off one by one...
|
| It's the same thing as the self-cooling design: OVH optimized for
| what typically matters in a DC. You want an energy-efficient
| design and you _never_ want power to go down.
|
| Well... except when you do. I suppose by now them and other
| hosting providers have taken that issue into account and are
| modifying their DC designs accordingly.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Since we are finding that post facto, I really doubt it. It
| means their customers did not care about compliance.
| boringg wrote:
| I think there is an assumption of compliance on behalf of the
| customer.
| sofixa wrote:
| Yes, but OVH's reputation is low cost and cutting corners.
| They have a lower price than the competition, and it
| doesn't take a lot to figure out why.
| bayindirh wrote:
| A proper datacenter can be both efficient and safe. Add solid
| blidners to close the chimneys, and an oxygen suppressant
| system (NOVEC, etc.), and add motorized switch-fuses. They can
| all be orchestrated by a PLC, and a fire alarm/control system.
|
| Close blinds, release NOVEC, disable power rails to computers.
| That's all. It might not stop everything, but it can help a
| lot.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| <virtue A>
|
| <virtue B>
|
| Affordable.
|
| Pick two.
|
| Unless you assume other people's money is unlimited (which is
| the accepted industry standard for online discourse related
| to subjects such as safety and reliability) there will always
| be tradeoffs.
|
| It's really easy to make low effort comments about the right
| balance being obvious when you're defining the right choice
| as "literally any balance of factors that does not recreate
| the precise set of circumstances that lead to the events that
| spurned this discussion."
| snovv_crash wrote:
| You can even have passive gates to close ducting which have a
| wax element which releases if it gets too hot. No extra
| electrical or PLC knowledge required, just put these on your
| inlets and outlets and you're good to go.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Of course you can, but I guess at that point you don't build
| your DC out of shipping containers.
| gregoriol wrote:
| Shipping containers are better against fire than wood. But
| here it's what was inside that seems to have been a
| problem, not the outer structure.
| AnssiH wrote:
| Just for the record so people don't get the wrong idea,
| SBG2 was not built out of shipping containers. OVH has
| other DCs that are, though.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Theoretically, you can. We looked into it.
|
| Also, Chinese build solid DC buildings out of containers.
| It's indeed possible.
| asciimike wrote:
| Which providers were you looking at? IIRC Huawei was the
| only company providing ISO container DCs, but the were
| super low density (e.g. 50kW total) compared to what the
| original Google/Sun/HP designs were.
| rurban wrote:
| As architect I don't understand how you can blame OVH here.
| Local fire code is within the city council, which uses the
| local fire department, and then with the maintainer. Without
| proper planning and fire code measures you won't get a permit.
| How did the constructor got a permit at all? This is a wooden
| building for F 60?? This must be F90 for starters. Then the
| electrical planning: How did they get a permit at all?
|
| OVH was only a renter. First I would blame local fire
| department for not enforcing their fire codes.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It could be that only risk to life, limb and neighbouring
| properties was evaluated and (probably correctly) concluded
| that the combination of low-occupation, trained staff and
| sufficient escape routes meant that the risk was minimal.
|
| If someone wants to burn down their own property, why not let
| them? That's up to the business and their insurance to judge.
| mihaaly wrote:
| You don't rent a log house to operate a glass manufacture
| inside! Each construction have limits of usage, quality or
| quantity wise, you know that.
|
| Those put their operation into a place must ascertein that
| the location can withstand the operations and its risks. Even
| renting a flat put limits on your activity in the contract,
| what you can or cannot do there.
|
| If they requested the proper fire rating and safety measures
| then it is not their mistake being deceived. Otherwise it is.
| [deleted]
| tuananh wrote:
| seems like they have done an exceptionly well done, high
| availability power design :D
| Zealotux wrote:
| I remember back when OVH was smugly mocking anyone who had
| concerns about their WC system, to be fair the concerns were
| kind of ridiculous but ultimately their system _did_ fail
| catastrophically.
|
| Glad to have left that company years before the fire, never
| doing business with them ever again.
| rosndo wrote:
| > Glad to have left that company years before the fire, never
| doing business with them ever again.
|
| What alternatives are there? Not many good ones at a
| comparable price point. (Yeah I know about online.net,
| Hetzner and so on. OVH offers a much more polished product
| and vastly better network)
|
| At the prices OVH offers, you can have your servers
| replicated in multiple datacenters for less money than many
| DCs would charge you for a single server with the same specs.
|
| At this price point it should be perfectly fine if a
| datacenter burns down occasionally. At least their network is
| otherwise very reliable.
| xmodem wrote:
| Hetzner
| rosndo wrote:
| But... Hetzner offers an even lower quality service at an
| even lower price point. (But only to low-volume buyers,
| OVH offers vastly better volume discounts)
|
| It would be strange to expect them to deal with the
| situation any differently if there was a catastrophic
| event in one of their DCs resulting in destroyed servers.
|
| When working with dedicated servers at this price point,
| you're very much expected to deal with your own backups.
| janwillemb wrote:
| > At this price point it should be perfectly fine if a
| datacenter burns down occasionally. At least their network
| is otherwise very reliable.
|
| That depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking
| for sustainable options, this probably doesn't include
| companies that burn down datacenters.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I would argue Hetzner is much better than OVH price-wise
| and I've been using a multiple-datacenter scheme with them
| for several years now for several of my clients. And
| they're very happy because the cost is so reasonable.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Some of their DCs don't look particularly fireproof
| either.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM
| rosndo wrote:
| Public rates offered by Hetzner are definitely slightly
| cheaper than OVH, but OVH offers vastly better volume
| discounts to even fairly small businesses (talking like
| 10-20k/mo spend).
|
| IME OVH also offers much better connectivity around the
| world (which makes sense, given that they operate at a
| much larger scale than Hetzner)
|
| Oh, and Hetzner billing support is absolutely terrible. I
| had to fight with them for months to stop charging for
| servers which had already been cancelled, after tens of
| emails they eventually owned up to having a bug on their
| end. It was like talking to a wall.
| ar-jan wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience. OVH charged my
| creditcard twice for the same payment, then simply
| refused to see the issue. I sent screenshots showing both
| payments, they just kept reiterating there was only one
| invoice (which was exactly the point). And every
| interaction typically took about five days -- for _each_
| follow-up to the same ticket. Had to revert one with my
| creditcard provider.
|
| With Hetzner on the other hand I've had technical support
| issues responded to adequately within two hours, multiple
| times. As a small individual customer no less.
| rosndo wrote:
| > With Hetzner on the other hand I've had technical
| support issues responded to adequately within two hours,
| multiple times. As a small individual customer no less.
|
| Hetzner has very good technical support, definitely no
| complaints about that. It's their billing department
| which is downright unpleasant to work with.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| I had the opposite experience - OVH support not
| responding for several days for fairly simple cases. They
| even forced me once to send a fax to them..
|
| I also had several outages with OVH (Exchange and
| Dedicated Server) - none yet with Hetzner. Right now
| planning to finally leave OVH for Hetzner and Microsoft
| (Exchange)
| terom wrote:
| Depending on what exactly you mean with multiple
| datacenters, make sure you take a look at the pictures of
| their DC sites - the DCs in one location may be right
| next to eachother. Like having your servers in SBG2 and
| backups in SBG1.
|
| You would need to use multiple locations, not just
| datacenters, for durability. The network performance
| between locations just isn't as good as between
| datacenters in the same location.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This even goes for Amazon. Multiple DCs in the same AZ
| can fail together.
| sterwill wrote:
| With AWS, the "datacenter" isn't a concept users have to
| worry about (or can even discover or manage). Each AZ
| comprises many datacenters, each region comprises many
| AZs, and AWS makes it easy to deploy most services across
| multiple AZs in a region. If one AWS datacenter goes down
| (and this happens occasionally), typically only one AZ in
| the region is affected.
| janmo wrote:
| Well, price are being jacked up and customers like myself
| are being kicked out on short notice. French providers
| become less and less attractive as electricity prices soar
| in France.
|
| See my post here of how they are jacking prices up:
| https://rorodi.substack.com/p/sorry-but-due-to-the-high-
| cost...
| conradfr wrote:
| Oh, is this why I was kicked out of my OneProvider server
| hosted by Scaleway/Online in Paris?
| lodddgn wrote:
| This post is useless without naming the specific
| provider.
| bbarnett wrote:
| They? I don't see OVH mentioned once at the above url. In
| fact, I see no provider mentioned.
|
| Why wouldn't you mention them? Is it generic clickbait,
| and you don't want to get sued?
| dspillett wrote:
| I'm not aware of OVH having jacked up prices recently at
| all (I have services with their SoYouStart and Kimsufi
| brands, and I'm sure such an occurrence would have
| started a bun-fight on the LET forums), at least some
| providers have.
|
| The big one (that did cause considerable consternation)
| was Hetzner some weeks ago, though they are based in
| Germany not France. See
| https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/176802/hetzner-price-
| incre... for much complaining about that one.
|
| As the problems causing price increases for power
| continue, I expect many cheap providers (who have very
| low margins so can't afford not to pass on significant
| increases in power costs), and larger outfits with budget
| lines, will have to change prices soon or fail.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I was so annoyed by that I actually started renting a new
| larger server from Hetzner because the old two would cost
| more and be slower, but since I'm a lazy bum and dislike
| the idea of losing anything, I haven't actually
| decommisioned anything yet, so I'm now paying 250% of
| what I did before, instead of 125%.
| totetsu wrote:
| relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1737/
| belter wrote:
| At Google scale that would be if a service is not
| working, we just deprecate it...
| Kelteseth wrote:
| Netcup has excellent pricing[1].
|
| [1] https://www.netcup.de/
| lodddgn wrote:
| They might, but they fail to disclose any kind of pricing
| for dedicated servers on their website and just send you
| to a "contact us" form instead. Hardly promising.
|
| Note that OVH is primarily focused on dedicated servers,
| a VPS host isn't comparable.
| richardfey wrote:
| > I suppose by now them and other hosting providers have taken
| that issue into account and are modifying their DC designs
| accordingly.
|
| Love your faith in humanity but I think we'd both be surprised
| about how little other hosting providers have changed after
| this incident.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| This setup is so far off standard practice it's shocking.
|
| Freeflowing does not excuse not having proper auto-closing
| dampers, triggered by the fire alarms or suppression system.
|
| Automatic power disconnects based on fire suppression system
| triggering are pretty standard. Most of the systems are fail-
| safe, meaning if the fire suppression panel loses power or is
| disconnected from the breakers feeding the room, the breakers
| trip off.
|
| That there were no automatic shutoffs or easily accessible
| breakers to disable the generators is shocking. Most NOCs
| I've visited, there are remote genset controls on one of the
| walls, often remote transfer switch controls as well. At the
| very least, on the way out the door someone in the NOC should
| have pushed the right buttons.
|
| I've never even heard of a commercial datacenter that didn't
| have fire suppression. Some companies go for preaction
| systems to reduce the chances of a "everything gets
| completely fucked by water" systems (gaseous systems are the
| gold standard, hugely expensive to install compared to
| water.)
|
| They had _wood_ ceilings!?
|
| In my career in the US, I've been around numerous situations
| where it was pretty obvious the fire inspector was being paid
| off or at the very least had an extremely cordial
| relationship with the building management. My guess is that
| something similar was happening here.
|
| I don't understand how they managed to have insurance, or get
| the ISO certifications they claimed they had.
| HstryrsrBttn wrote:
| Autoclosing is a must.
|
| What fire department didn't do the walkthrough? Here that
| is obligatory and when that happens you can be sure that
| even a carton sti left from the newest installation is
| reprimanded.
|
| The last room I took take of was accepted with protocol by
| an architect. The carpenter and electrition had to explain
| every single change they made and justify that fire
| protection was reasonable (e.g. if necessary an extra layer
| of plasterboard and plaster on every small bit that could
| ignite was mandatory to gain an est. 30min on top here and
| there)
|
| ISO: what apart from documentation is necessary for ISO?
| What Standard are you referring to?
| hughrr wrote:
| I've been in a lot of major data centres in the UK and OVH is
| definitely a complete joke compared to the worst of them.
|
| Apart from Host Europe in Nottingham who no longer exist
| there AFAIK. That was worse than OVH.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| > OVH is definitely a complete joke compared to the worst
| of them
|
| what leads you to say that? just curious
| hughrr wrote:
| Even the bad ones had proper fire suppression systems and
| electrical cut outs.
| bartvk wrote:
| If you make such strong statements, I would expect that you
| back it up. For now, it reads as a shallow dismissal, and
| the guidelines talk about that:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| hughrr wrote:
| Simple comparison. The ones I've been in, including the
| bad ones, actually had more than adequate fire
| suppression systems, proper electrical cut outs, fire
| monitoring systems and certificates proving that they had
| been audited and tested.
|
| This OVH DC was designed to a cost rather than a safety
| specification and the risk did not pay off.
| richardfey wrote:
| How does it practically work? e.g. if I were OVH I just
| pick any building owner that gives me the cheapest deal,
| and such owner has absolutely zero concerns as well about
| safety? Or would OVH own or co-own the building? I am
| surprised that the landlord didn't have a virtuous conflict
| of interest in this case.
| hughrr wrote:
| They specified a price and it was built to that price
| point. All corners cut as requested.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's a massive multi-story datacenter used only by them,
| specifically designed and built for their passive cooling
| concept, surrounded by other datacenters used only by
| them. I would be very surprised if they didn't own the
| building
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Authorities typically take fire safety serious. So if the
| fire department write that in their report, authorities
| typically will adapt their regulation and inspections.
| ta988 wrote:
| In US and Germany yes, in France? We shall see.
| redm wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time in US Data-centers, and I can't
| remember seeing one without an EOD. I've even seen them pressed
| a few times accidentally when people exiting the floor thought
| they were "exit" buttons.
|
| Are they talking about the lack of an EOD or something more
| fundamental to the power system? It almost seems like you need
| something external to the facility in case of a fire where it's
| unsafe to enter the building.
| belter wrote:
| Used them a few years ago with no complaints, but sounds like
| they need to then be a bit more specific on their compliance
| page: https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/enterprise/certification-
| conform...
|
| Edit: To clarify, they are claiming generic compliance with for
| example ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 et 27018. Does not look like it
| from the incident report. Maybe only some of their offers, and
| that is the detail I am referring to.
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| Their most recent ISO/IEC 27001 certificate is available at
|
| https://www.lne.fr/recherche-
| certificats/data_certificats/37...
|
| The SOA date and the effective date of the certificate are
| posterior to the fire incident in question.
| belter wrote:
| Fire was at OVH SBG2.
|
| OVH SBG1, SBG2 and SBG3 were all at: Rue du Bassin de
| l'Industrie, 67000 Strasbourg, France.
|
| The addendum to that document says is only related to
| activities on the sites mentioned. The address Rue du
| Bassin de l'Industrie, 67000 Strasbourg is listed, so
| sounds like they have now addressed the issues.
| curiousgal wrote:
| I have been an ovh customer for over 8 years but they kept
| increasing their prices and lowering their offerings, I finally
| moved on and have zero sympathy for them.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Who did you move on to, please?
| lodddgn wrote:
| What do you mean? OVH has hugely improved their offerings in
| that time.
|
| They introduced world class DDoS protection for all clients.
|
| They massively improved their global connectivity, and continue
| to do so.
|
| They've drastically improved their support, hiring much much
| more English speaking staff than they used to have.
|
| Not to mention generally improved tooling offered to customers.
| pzduniak wrote:
| I gave OVH a chance by suggesting it to a client. Prior to
| that point, I had been using an OVH dedicated server for
| personal stuff without any issues.
|
| We opted for OVH Public Cloud and their Managed Kubernetes
| (which was considered stable at that point). Kubernetes
| randomly froze up after deployment, requiring manual
| intervention from the staff. We had no way to restart the
| Control Plane on our own. It always took 3+ messages / 1h+ on
| the phone to reach someone capable of handling it. After
| months of complaining, they didn't address anything. That was
| late 2020.
|
| What forced us to migrate away was when we got a VM with a
| broken NVMe SSD that broke PostgreSQL data and OVH refused to
| acknowledge the problem. Phone support was still practically
| unreachable. After spending countless hours debugging their
| crappy services, we just gave up and moved to Oracle Cloud.
| Best decision ever - their discounts are great and support is
| excellent. They're clearly trying to challenge the big 3.
|
| As we were leaving OVH, we send one last email that finally
| reached someone who gave a crap about customers. They replied
| that they will "have a manager talk with us"... I don't think
| that ever happened.
|
| Even if they improve their services, I don't trust them
| anymore. It was beyond horrible.
| [deleted]
| lbriner wrote:
| Don't be upset if people aren't going to take your word for
| it with an account created 46 minutes ago!
| rosndo wrote:
| You can confirm all of those things by googling a little.
| bilekas wrote:
| I remember this fire, it was definitely one of the biggest
| disruptions for us at the time.
|
| > it took three hours to cut off the power supply because there
| was no universal cut-off.
|
| This seems really egregious given the nature of data centers, I
| would argue less so than the wooden ceilings, those were treated
| to survive an hour long fire, one would thing if the building was
| grounded with no electricity the fire could have been handled
| much faster.
| gcoguiec wrote:
| As a former OVH employee, I was constantly reminded to avoid
| "surqualite" and try to understand OVH's "bricolocracie" better.
| I never could. I hope this shock will incite the company to
| improve the quality of its infrastructure and products. I only
| wish OVH the best.
| breakingcups wrote:
| As a non-French speaker, could you explain the second term to
| me?
| charliedevolve wrote:
| Roughly, "ruled by whatever you have on hand"?
| tripa wrote:
| "duct-tape-ocracy"
| nacos wrote:
| "Bricolo" is kind of a slang term for "Bricolage" which can
| be translated to DIY / Tinkering.
|
| -cracy as in the ancient greek word that is used in
| democracy/meritocracy/...
|
| In this specific context, I believe parent is hinting (in a
| negative way) about the internal culture of OVH that could be
| interpreted as not up to professional standards ?
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Indeed
|
| "Bricolage", in a private context (typically DIY light home
| renovation) doesn't bear any negative connotations. In
| fact, several hardware store chains use the term (Mr.
| Bricolage, Brico Depot, Bricorama).
|
| But using the term when describing a product or in a
| professional context is far more negative, often describing
| something which doesn't look well made or designed.
| dmw_ng wrote:
| Similar concept from India
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
| gcoguiec wrote:
| "bricolocracie" isn't a genuine French word and is only used
| internally at OVH (as far as I know).
|
| "tinkerocracy" is probably an acceptable translation.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Ah, same root as "bricolage."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage
| cibyr wrote:
| Would a reasonable translation be something like "avoid
| overengineering; get used to hacking things together"?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Orrr we can finally replace x86 with energy efficient arm chips!
| fmajid wrote:
| Irresponsible design. It's not just the fire and the damage to
| businesses, but the report lists concerns about lead from the UPS
| batteries being spread all the way to Germany as a result of the
| plume from the fire, as well as in the water from the firemen.
| Fortunately, in this case, they measured the water and found no
| significant amounts, nor did the German environmental
| authorities, but it could easily have been as bad as the Notre-
| Dame fire where a huge chunk of innermost Paris was contaminated
| by lead from the destroyed roof.
| userbinator wrote:
| Of all the things to be the worried about being released by a
| fire...?!
|
| No. Lead is way down on the list. I'd be far more concerned
| about the other carcinogens from stuff burning.
| mtmail wrote:
| > all the way to Germany
|
| For reference, the border to Germany is about 250m from the
| building https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/11917092
| detaro wrote:
| (Title truncated from original " _OVHcloud fire report: SBG2 data
| center had wooden ceilings, no extinguisher, and no power cut-
| out_ " to fit HN length limit)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I deal with a ton of spam/phishing/malware that comes from OVH
| datacenters - OVH does nothing with complaints. Sometimes you
| really do reap what you sow.
| encoderer wrote:
| Who else is not surprised that discount hosting providers cut
| corners?
| londons_explore wrote:
| In a datacenter fire, the risk to human life is very small (has
| anyone ever died in a datacenter fire, apart from being
| suffocated by a halon system?).
|
| It's just property risk, data loss and service downtime.
| Therefore, it's a business decision.
|
| I have worked in a business that, during a fire, prioritized
| maintaining service uptime over putting the fire out. The end
| result: They had to buy more new servers, but customer workloads
| were migrated away within 15 minutes and saw no outage. For them,
| it was the right decision.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Except the fire damaged other buildings and spread lead all the
| way to Germany.
| 0xbeefbeefbeef wrote:
| The datacenter is about 100ft from the German border.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| "All the way to Germany" doesn't say much if the building
| that's on fire is practically on the German border.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fire suppression systems have risks all their own:
|
| https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/11/06/work...
|
| That was still under construction.
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, most fires involve risk to human life if firefighters
| have to enter the building to extinguish it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Did this one involve said risk?
|
| Maybe risk to life was eliminated by a combination of low
| occupancy, trained staff and adequate escape routes so that
| there's no reason for firefighters to enter it, and the
| building was essentially designed to be disposable should the
| worst happen?
|
| I don't see this as a particularly bad thing - if risk to
| life and neighbouring properties was correctly managed (and
| it seems like it was here), why not allow this?
| mannykannot wrote:
| Indeed, and they also often enter buildings to look for
| people who are in harm's way. OHVcloud's omissions did not
| amount to a good business decision, it was an irresponsible
| one.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I have to imagine that smoke from the burning computing
| equipment isn't the healthiest thing for anyone downwind of the
| fire.
| katekoch wrote:
| taubek wrote:
| Aren't there some regulations that would prevent such building to
| get operating permit?
| krisoft wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment.
|
| It is an industrial site. Nobody got hurt. The fire didn't
| spread to other people's property. Why are you all so upset
| about this?
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Why is Hacker News uniquely such a hotbed for uninformed
| libertarianism?
|
| 1. There were concerns about lead poisoning that were only
| quelled with testing. I doubt you have knowledge beyond an
| environmental protection agency, or a crystal ball. 2. As
| someone else has already said, a break that small for a fire
| that large is laughable. 3. Fighting this fire put human life
| at risk. 4. Fighting this fire also used resources that
| could've been allocated elsewhere, or not at all.
|
| Every business operation does not exist in its own vacuum,
| and you cannot say that concern is illegitimate just because
| "nothing bad happened". Again, you did not have a crystal
| ball then, and you still don't.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a pretty common attitude in software and business. A
| significant number of people mistake their work
| implementing processes in software as domain expertise.
| (Why would I talk to a building engineer, I has the
| Google?) It's a type of hubris or arrogance.
|
| Often times software people get deep in the weeds and think
| a lot about a particular problem set, but don't realize
| that they are actually working inside a fence and don't see
| the bigger picture. It's just like driving - your skill on
| a racecourse is scoped by the ability of generations of
| engineering of the brakes that enable you to go fast.
|
| Nowadays, we have mid career tech people here who have
| never known anything but building stuff in clouds, and have
| had everything related to building facilities magically
| taken care of behind the AWS curtain. Anything related to
| datacenter facilities is black magic.
| cbg0 wrote:
| That's some nasty gatekeeping right there.
| boringg wrote:
| I think the sentiment is this was easily avoidable if the
| company had put in some standard technology. It feels like
| there were corners cut and maybe even the data center was
| built in an area that had lax fire standards to lower the
| cost.
| [deleted]
| wiz21c wrote:
| I don't understand your sentiment.
|
| The design choices created substantial risk to the life of
| firefighters.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think the upset is a general feeling, not necessarily at
| the incident.
|
| Living in a modern era, I think we take for granted that the
| building regulations prevent this type of disaster, and it
| looks like they don't.
|
| Even in an industrial park, one would expect that engineering
| effort would have gone into fire suppression and safety
| systems. It's easy to wave off something as "whatever, it's
| an industrial facility", but skimping on things like shutoff
| switches is a demonstration that the company was chasing
| pennies and putting worker lives at risk.
|
| Nobody got hurt because nobody was there.
| cbg0 wrote:
| It _could_ have spread, and people _could_ have gotten hurt.
| If you have a useful head on your shoulders, then you should
| have a proactive mindset and try to prevent issues instead of
| sending thoughts and prayers after the fact.
| krisoft wrote:
| > It could have spread, and people could have gotten hurt.
|
| Could it though? It is a standalone installation on an
| industrial site. There are about ten meter-ish standoff
| between them and their neighbours. (which is also an
| industrial site)
|
| > If you have a useful head on your shoulders, then you
| should have a proactive mindset and try to prevent issues
|
| And if you have an even more useful head on your shoulders
| you calibrate your level of upset to the level of actual
| danger.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Yes, firemen and the technical personnel who had to turn
| off the power in a room with 1-meter long arcs definitely
| could have gotten hurt.
|
| Also,
|
| > the level of actual danger
|
| was quite high, 10 meter is nowhere near enough to ensure
| a fire won't jump over and it might suit you not to make
| insinuations on the level of danger if you don't have
| enough experience in the area you're talking about.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > There are about ten meter-ish standoff between them and
| their neighbours.
|
| Here in Norway there was a vicious fire[1] in a small
| town in 2014. It was during winter, and it had been below
| freezing for months before. If you think 10m is enough to
| contain a fire, here's a quote from the Wikipedia
| article:
|
| _For a while it was thought that the [village 's ice
| rink] would be a fireline. But the fire made a jump of
| over 130 meters, and then set fire to a water truck._
|
| [1]:
| https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brannen_i_L%C3%A6rdal_2014
| lbriner wrote:
| If you think 10m is enough of a fire break, you have no
| experience of fire. The infra-red heat that comes off of
| a fire is incredibly intense and can easily spread those
| distances as that distance, especially if pieces of
| flammable debris were to bridge the gap.
|
| It woul dbe fair enough if that design was recognised and
| signed-off by the local inspectors, then no-one would
| complain but it sounds like they were just not doing the
| risk assessment properly.
| staticelf wrote:
| At the time of the fire I used nodechef that hosted their
| services on OVH and seemingly all their backups as well (in the
| same datacenter). Turns out when extraordinary events happen
| promises of backups and such aren't always kept.
|
| We lost some data because of that, luckily we had our own
| backups. A good reminder to make sure you have backups and that
| they are working correctly. No matter what promises anyone gives
| you should always have your own backup strategy that's
| disconnected from the vendor you use.
|
| It was Nodechefs fault, not OVH obviously but perhaps it's
| interesting for others.
| mkj wrote:
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Make sure to read the T's and C's and availability / retention
| rates closely; it's a process that involves decoding the
| legalese and trying to associate it with RL situations.
|
| Amazon's S3 for example offers a 99.999999999% data durability
| guarantee, with other bits implying they can withstand a
| datacenter going up in flames. But there's two caveats there;
| data availability is lower (so if that datacenter goes up in
| flame your data may not be lost, but it may also not be
| directly accessible until they restore their backups), and if
| they do lose data, what is the consequences to them? It'll be a
| financial compensation at best.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Amazon's S3 for example offers a 99.999999999% data
| durability guarantee
|
| IIRC AWS S3 was subjected to formal methods design using
| TLA+, so as long as the underlying infrastructure is
| correctly implemented, I suspect the durability guarantee is
| on fairly solid foundations.
|
| Also of course, I suspect the durability guarantee is based
| on what option you select for your bucket in the S3 console.
| terom wrote:
| Breaking the S3 durability guarantees badly enough to get
| press attention would be a critical reputational hit, with
| the consequences going far beyond just the contractual SLA
| compensation for the customers.
|
| It would still heal with time, though. There was a period
| after some nasty incidents where the general advice was to
| avoid EBS for anything critical... but that's over now.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > badly enough to get press attention would be a critical
| reputational hit
|
| Would it? Equifax basically had the worst possible outcome
| and survived it just fine.
| lbriner wrote:
| Would it be critical though? Unless there are lots of
| alternatives at a similar availability and price-point,
| most people aren't just going to jump to another provider.
| Clouds sound largely interchangeable but you try swapping
| from Azure to AWS or vice-versa: for anything more than the
| simplest system, this would probably take 12 months+
| staticelf wrote:
| Well yes but Nodechef was used before I joined the company I
| work for. Needless to say, we migrated away from them due to
| that they didn't handle the situation to our satisfaction.
|
| Since then we've updated our view on backups a lot and it was
| a valuable lesson for us (or rather the managers). We didn't
| lose that much data and not anything important since we had
| backups but they were not daily.
|
| Even if you read the terms and conditions it's hard as a
| developer to really grok what legalese actually say in
| practice and since I work for a small company we can't really
| go out and hire a lawyer for each and every terms and
| conditions. Instead we now spend time to write our own backup
| strategy in case a new fire should occur, or something else
| like war.
| ovi256 wrote:
| The report points out (Image 8) design choices that contributed
| to a raging fire, once the fire started:
|
| * no emergency electricity cut-off device, an "economic strategy
| choice of the site operator" - the electrical room where the fire
| started was hot, 400C at the door (measured by thermal camera),
| with meter long electrical arcing from the door, thundering
| deafening sounds. Making access of utility technicians
| "difficult" - it took them 2 hours to cut incoming electrical
| service from the utility. On site UPS devices also had no cut-
| off, so they kept supplying.
|
| * emergency water network provided only 70m3/h at the site. A
| firefighting boat arrived, Europa 1, was called, supplying
| 14.5m3/min max flow rate.
|
| The freeflowing air cooling design, a good design choice as it
| saves on operating costs for cooling, contributed to nourishing
| the fire.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| So basically, my takeaway is:
|
| * Freeflowing air in DCs is good for cooling( * It's bad when
| you have a fire;
|
| * An improved DC design would allow an operator to $somehow
| stop the freeflowing air (although one could argue that it's
| not free flowing anymore if one can control it);
|
| * I'd like to know how much money really was saved by not
| allowing the UPSes to be cut off.
|
| I'm very curious how the insurance companies respond, and
| whether they'll demand e.g. UPS supplies to be able to cut off.
| Or maybe in general, the fire department should be more aware
| of these types of trade-offs being made, and give their
| approval accordingly.
| smarx007 wrote:
| > I'd like to know how much money really was saved by not
| allowing the UPSes to be cut off.
|
| I don't think this was a cost-cutting measure. Instead,
| (automatic) cut-off devices are also systems that can fail.
| And if there is such a centralized device, it can nullify the
| hard work of 4 redundant power supplies if it "decides" to
| malfunction one day. So, this was a SPOF-cutting measure. I
| still think that having 4 separate switches for 4 power
| supplies is not so wrong. Firefighters anyway wrote that the
| electrical room had a door at 400C and observed 1-meter arcs,
| so they had to ask the electrical company to cut the power
| from their side for the sake of safety anyway.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| The report says that the cut-off device was not present due
| to an economic/financial decision made by the company .
| It's weird to see that in a post incident report from a
| fire department, but I guess they thought it was worth
| mentioning.
| tssva wrote:
| I disagree with your idea that not having an automated
| power disconnect system is acceptable but for the sake of
| argument lets say it is. The standard for manual emergency
| power cutoff switches is to be located where they are
| easily accessible in an emergency which means outside of
| the electrical room. Most large data centers have manual
| switches in multiple locations. They should at a minimum
| have had cutoff switches located in their NOC.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Right! Sorry, I didn't write it clearly but I agree that
| there should be automatic disconnect, but think it's OK
| to have 4 separate disconnects to maintain the supply
| redundancy. Though now it can get really expensive.
| the_arun wrote:
| Building datacenters and is hard. So this is an opportunity
| for cloud providers.
|
| 1. Imagine if Amazon starts building datacenters for others
| as a service
|
| 2. People starts leasing or renting entire DCs built by
| Amazon, Google etc. Maintenance is done by these cloud
| providers.
|
| Do we have these already?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 1. Imagine if Amazon starts building datacenters for
| others as a service
|
| Just as an FYI, those fancy datacentres you see on
| Amazon/Google/Microsoft marketing videos are really the
| exception rather than the rule.
|
| You will find the majority of cloud servers in exactly
| the same third-party datacentres that everyone else uses.
|
| Why ?
|
| Because only the US and perhaps one or two other
| countries in the world has the spare land for a cloud
| operator to dump a massive datacentre campus on.
|
| Most other countries don't. Or if they do, its either
| protected land (greenbelt etc.) or its uninhabitable
| (e.g. Australian Outback).
| rjvs wrote:
| The observation in the first half of your comment seems
| sound but your explanation doesn't make sense.
|
| There's rather a lot of land in the world outside of the
| US that could have a datacenter built on it. There's also
| a lot of Australia that's uninhabited but not
| uninhabitable.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| I oversimplified a bit, by "land" I also meant associated
| infrastructure, which includes for example access to
| electricity. In most countries, building out new high-
| voltage infrastructure to where it does not exist is both
| financially expensive and technically painful (planning
| permission etc). Same for pulling fibre runs to the
| middle of nowhere.
|
| No doubt other things like local laws, tax rebates and
| whatnot also come into play as well.
|
| You may seek to argue that there are a _small_ number of
| third-party datacentre sites where the cloud operator is
| the sole tenant of the building. But this again is not
| the same thing as the cloud operator building their own.
| They get the option to up sticks and leave at the end of
| their contract. They also don 't have any responsibility
| over facilities management etc.
|
| At most sites, the cloud operator simply has whole or
| part of a floor (or floors in larger buildings), the rest
| of the building is occupied by third-party customers.
| lbriner wrote:
| It is VERY common in buildings to have ventilation dampers
| that are closed when a fire alarm starts exactly for this
| reason. I am most surprised that the design sounds like it
| was made a certain way deliberately even though the basics
| were got wrong. Does Strasbourg not have any fire regulations
| that require fireman accessible power cut-outs, automatic
| extinguishers etc?
|
| It doesn't matter just that their equipment burned but the
| severity of the fire was massively dangerous to the fire
| brigade and anything else nearby if it couldn't be
| extinguished properly.
| ovi256 wrote:
| > Does Strasbourg not have any fire regulations that
| require fireman accessible power cut-outs, automatic
| extinguishers etc?
|
| I think it's a safe bet it doesn't, because that building
| passed fire safety review and was approved as such.
| michaelt wrote:
| I can't speak for Strasbourg, but here in the UK you
| don't get an inspection by the local building inspector
| or fire department - instead, you hire a fire risk
| assessor of your choice, on the free market.
|
| So if you're not in compliance, you don't need to bribe
| anyone or cheat - you simply have to hire a friendly
| dumbass who'll check the basics but won't ask too many
| questions.
| xxpor wrote:
| Mark this one up as something else that's been privatized
| in the UK that's shocking to me as an American. This sort
| of stuff is always run through the government (the level
| depends on the state).
|
| Insurance companies might impose additional requirements,
| but then they'll send out their own inspectors.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| The inspector is a chartered engineer, and is liable if
| your building don't confirm to the fire code.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Instead, you hire a fire risk assessor of your choice,
| on the free market.
|
| That sounds a lot better than the one size fits all crap
| we get in the US. If you are trying to do anything other
| than take over an existing and operating industrial site
| that's grandfathered in or run a warehouse for some sort
| of boring and non-reactive goods it tends to be a
| terrible maze of conflicting and irrelevant requirements.
| xxpor wrote:
| Note the OP said the inspectors were privatized, not the
| actual building codes. The only difference is the private
| inspectors sound like they'll let you skate by on some
| stuff.
|
| You find the same dynamic in states with private
| emissions inspections. Spend any time on a car enthusiast
| website and everyone knows "the guy" to go to that'll
| pass your obviously illegal emissions equipment bypass...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Note the OP said the inspectors were privatized
|
| I know exactly what he said and that's why I said exactly
| what I said.
|
| >The only difference is the private inspectors sound like
| they'll let you skate by on some stuff
|
| Government building inspections are incredibly onerous
| unless you're a homeowner building a deck or a developer
| building cookie cutter houses or offices. You run into
| all sorts of stupid edge cases depending on what the
| facility being built is intended for and you need to get
| clarification on what you should do. Have you ever
| actually tried to get government clarification about
| something? They need to be dragged kicking and screaming,
| often through a courtroom to ever clarify anything in
| writing because nobody wants to set a precedent or take
| the responsibility of making judgement calls. Having
| professionals who will take the responsibility of those
| judgement calls is a massive net plus.
|
| The fact that your knee jerk response is to frame
| professionals using judgement their jobs as "letting you
| state by" is just crazy. Would you say the same thing if
| the context was a PE crunching numbers, finding something
| that didn't pass the default rules and then using their
| judgement to conclude it was fine because of other
| situational details? People do their jobs satisfactorily
| the overwhelming majority of the time. Being on the
| government payroll doesn't make public inspectors immune
| from playing favorites or making screw ups. It just means
| the oversights follow a different pattern. Everyone's
| experienced plenty of government inspectors who don't do
| their job because it's Friday and they want to GTFO.
|
| > Spend any time on a car enthusiast website and everyone
| knows "the guy" to go to that'll pass your obviously
| illegal emissions equipment bypass...
|
| If the vehicle code were written the way the building
| code and occupational health and safety code is that's
| the only way any commercial vehicle that isn't a cookie
| cutter box truck would ever pass an inspection.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think it's a valid question; inspections themselves can
| be failure points.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Does Strasbourg not have any fire regulations that
| require fireman accessible power cut-outs, automatic
| extinguishers etc?
|
| Fire codes for industrial buildings, office buildings and
| residential buildings differ by quite a lot. Usually, they
| get stricter the more people are supposed to be in a
| building and what their training status in
| firefighting/escape is.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Does Strasbourg not have any fire regulations that
| require fireman accessible power cut-outs, automatic
| extinguishers etc?
|
| On the other hand, it could be that this was deliberately
| allowed for buildings with low/no occupancy, easy, safe &
| quick escape routes and no risk to neighbouring properties.
|
| If someone wants to risk their own property, as long as
| they don't risk harming anyone, why not allow it?
| wmf wrote:
| Just don't try to buy fire insurance.
| hinkley wrote:
| > The freeflowing air cooling design, a good design choice as
| it saves on operating costs for cooling, contributed to
| nourishing the fire.
|
| The reason you use forced air in your house instead of being
| built for natural convection is so you don't die in a fire.
| Fires are all about convection. Infernos doubly so.
|
| There was an early luxury cruise ship tragedy, I think in New
| York City. A 'freeflowing air cooling design' and all wood
| paneling. It caught on fire, so they turned around to come back
| into port... and burned to the waterline, killing a bunch of
| people.
|
| Building code for passenger ships got changed to require forced
| air and limit natural (flammable) materials after this.
| watsocd wrote:
| I have done work on a power system for a data center in a
| previous life.
|
| It is not easy to shut power off in a data center. They are
| designed that way intentionally. Yes, it is fairly easy to shut
| down utility power. But then you have automatic diesel generators
| that will start. If you shut them down, then you have battery
| powered UPS units.
|
| In the building that I knew well in Canada, they had a well
| guarded and covered button behind the security desk that was
| labeled 'EPO': Emergency Power Off.
|
| This button would send a signal to all systems (utility switches,
| diesel generator, and UPS units) to immediately shutdown or don't
| even start (diesels).
| jve wrote:
| Small correction: UPS start after utility power goes down and
| only THEN Diesel stats up. Because you can't start diesel
| generator in a fraction of a heartbeat.
| ge96 wrote:
| I have been using their services for several years now. I
| remember one time there was a fire and they reimbursed me for the
| down time.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Is the reimbursement just pro-rated for the service costs (i.e.
| 1 day downtime = 1/30th discount of the monthly bill) or
| something more? If it's just service costs, I find it almost
| inconsequential compared to the costs to the business of having
| downtime.
| ge96 wrote:
| I can see that to be fair my stuff is just personal websites
| nobody looks at.
|
| Edit: aside from my own cheap stuff, I also use AWS but I
| have not gotten to the scale where if AWS went down the site
| runs off something else.
| FDSGSG wrote:
| This is cheap self-service hosting, the customer is expected
| to deal with things like backups themselves. If your business
| suffers from a single DC going down, it's your fault.
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