OVHcloud has opened a new data center at the point where it suffered a major fire in 2021: Strasbourg. The data center, which is called SBG5is the first projected by the company in its hyper-resilience plan, which it drew up in April of last year, and in which data centers are projected specially prepared for fire resistance.
In total, OVHcloud intends to open 15 data centers by 2024. With this policy, the group will be able to expand the sites it already has, reach new regions, and tackle new use cases focused on sustainability and resiliency. According to the company, its Roubais campus will have a tenth data center (RBX10), and in Gravelines, a fourth (GRA4). During the first half of 2023 a new AZ region will open with three data centers in the Paris region.
SBG5 has a total area of 1,700 square meters and has 19 isolated rooms to compartmentalize its different sectors. It offers a fire resistance of two hours and has a gas fire extinguishing system, which complies with the APSAD R13 standard. In addition, its VESDA smoke detection system complies with the APSAD R7 standard. It also has 7 energy rooms and 3 battery rooms, but they are located outside the main building.
In Germany, the OVHcloud Limburg Campus will have a fourth data center (LIM4) in the third quarter of 2023, and will launch a new remote site for opening in 2024. Due to the company’s growth in North America, OVHcloud also has intends to expand the Beauharnois campus with a ninth data center: BHS9, and to open a new data center in Toronto in 2023. In Asia, OVHcloud will have its first data center in India, in Mumbai, before the end of the 2022. In addition, a second data center will arrive in Singapore in 2023.
It features a water-cooling system for server components that achieves a water-use efficiency rate of less than 0.2 liters per kilowatt-hour. That is, it uses the equivalent of a glass of water to cool a server for 10 hours of use. Its closed circuit system also limits liquid waste, in addition to using dry coolers and not having air conditioning in the server rooms. This makes it possible to achieve an energy use efficiency index (PUE) of between 1.1 and 1.2, 36% less than the industry average, which is 1.57.
In addition, OVHcloud will launch a data center dedicated to raw data backups as part of your resilience plan. It is located at a distance from the service operation centers and has been deployed for the first time for the company’s French customers. In the near future, the group has plans to extend this service to all its locations and solutions. In addition to this remote storage solution, OVHcloud offers various services to facilitate data backup and recovery, such as Veeam Enterprise and Zerto.
On the other hand, OVHcloud will launch next November its new Cold Archive cloud storage payment service, with which companies will be able to store what is known as long-term cold data. This service is based on four mini data centers spread across France, with a minimum distance between them of 200 kilometers. Each of these sites is interconnected, which guarantees a permanent level of backup with redundancy mechanisms, prepared for any problem.
The service is based on a robust archive solution on tape, developed in collaboration with IBM and Atempo. This solution will start to be commercialized from November 2022, in order to offer a secure long-term storage solution.
