Are there industry options or methods of wiring to allow for a UPS room separate from the actual rooms the racks are stored in?<p>It's almost tradition to have a rack with UPS's in the bottom and then the rest of the space filled with servers or drive arrays.<p>We wouldn't ever think of putting a tiny backup generator in the bottom of every rack, so why do we put a battery storage system there? Also, with the advances in battery chemistry technology that improve reliability and density, it's only a matter of time until Lithium chemistry batteries are available and that also increases the risk of fire.<p>Is there any reason not to move backup power to another room, or even to a separate structure like how they put backup generators on a pad outside of the building?
Two interesting pictures from the earlier story...<p>How close the 3 data centers are in SBG: <a href="https://cdn.baxtel.com/data-center/ovh-strasbourg-campus/photos/flickity_display_OVH-Strasbourg-Campus-OVH-Strasbourg-Campus-showing-all-3-Buildings-2019.png" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.baxtel.com/data-center/ovh-strasbourg-campus/pho...</a><p>How hot that fire was. I'm pretty sure the orange spots are holes melted in the walls that are made from metal shipping containers: <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwGqV17XMAMF_wa?format=jpg&name=large" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwGqV17XMAMF_wa?format=jpg&name=...</a>
I think the key issue here is that there wasn't a functioning fire suppresssion system in place.<p>Second question: is such a system required for this kind of operation? Maybe?
The raw video link is <a href="https://www.ovh.com/fr/images/sbg/Octave-Klaba-speaking-en-vid.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://www.ovh.com/fr/images/sbg/Octave-Klaba-speaking-en-v...</a>
Lucky it wasn’t a UPS explosion. <a href="https://h2tools.org/lessons/battery-room-explosion" rel="nofollow">https://h2tools.org/lessons/battery-room-explosion</a>
tl;dr UPS maintenance was performed by a vendor the day before the fire. Fire department used a thermal camera to isolate source of fire, it seemed to originate with 2 UPSes, one of which was the recently maintained UPS
If it turns out it's the upses that caught fire, one can't help but wonder if it would be a better idea to house the upses/backup power solutions in an adjacent smaller building outfitted with sprinklers perhaps?
Not to be rude, but it's really wild to me that even after all this time during the pandemic, the CEO doesn't have a headset he can use so that the audio is intelligible. It's gotta be one of the highest ROI investments you can possibly make at this point.
This would be one of inherient difference between smaller vs. giga players in cloud hosting.<p>AWS/Google/Azure, if this happens, there should only be limited outage to a small fraction of customers. As a matter of fact, Google had such an incident before, and literally no customers (internal and external) noticed.