OVHcloud Opens Strasbourg, France, SBG5 Datacenter

OVHcloud Groupe SAS inaugurated its SBG5 datacenter in Strasbourg, France.

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During this event, held in presence of Bruno Le Maire, minister of economy, finance and industrial and digital sovereignty, Jean-Noël Barrot, minister delegate, digital transition and telecommunications, Thierry Breton, European commissioner, internal market, as well as representatives from local authorities and the French cloud industry, the group unveiled the breadth of innovations coming from its hyper-resilience plan as well as the measures deployed to reduce the environmental footprint of its infrastructures.

As part of its strategic plan, OVHcloud confirms the opening of 15 sites by 2024, to provide its customers with IaaS and PaaS solutions in a trusted and sustainable framework. This ambitious industrial policy will enable the group to expand existing sites, conquer new geographies, and also address new use cases through a hyper-resilient and sustainable model.

“In a booming market, OVHcloud stands out for its ability to deploy innovative solutions with the best price-performance ratio, all the while meeting the highest security standards and deploying a model that respects our environmental challenges. The opening of SBG5 is a strong symbol of this industrial strategy, which allows us to champion the European values of an open, trusted, and sustainable cloud, and this, to our customers around the world. Our local anchorage and our constant investment in the territories allow us to strengthen our position in the employment areas to bring in new skills”, said Michel Paulin, CEO.

Bruno Le Maire and Jean-Noël Barrot declared: “The opening of this new datacenter, which is less energy-consuming, marks an essential step in the development of OVHcloud. Thus, the company positions itself at the heart of the French and European digital sovereignty the Government has been helping to build since 2017. It demonstrates the resilience and innovation of the French cloud ecosystem and bolsters the choice that France has made to retain full control over its data.”

SBG5: first realization of hyper-resilience plan
SBG5 is the first datacenter which design comes from the hyper-resilience plan laid out as early as April 2021, and representing an investment of €30 million. The site, with a surface of 1 700 m², counts 19 isolated rooms benefiting from masonry to compartmentalize segments offering a fire resistance of up to 2 hours. The gas fire extinguishing system is rated APSAD R13 and VESDA smoke detection is rated APSAD R7. The 7 energy rooms and 3 battery rooms are located outside of the building.

Hyper-resilience principles applied to SBG5 datacenter
In line with its commitments, the group will launch a datacenter dedicated to raw data backups (snapshots), located remotely from service operating sites. First deployed for French customers, the company intends to extend this service to cover its entire range of solutions and locations.

In addition to this remote storage solution, it provides a variety of services to facilitate backup and DR, such as Veeam Enterprise for securing business via the backup of strategic workloads (VMWare, physical Windows/Linux servers or NAS), and Zerto for the backup and restoration of VMs as part of DR plans on Hosted Private Cloud infrastructures.

Finally, the firm will launch a storage service in November 2022 – Cold Archive – a hyper-resilient solution at a competitive price. This service will allow businesses to store so-called ‘cold data’ on the long run, while benefiting from security and reliability.

Service is based on:

4 mini datacenters spread across France with at least 200km of distance between sites. With each site being interconnected, a permanent level of backup is guaranteed with redundancy mechanisms, whatever the situation is.
A resilient tape-based archives solution, developed in partnership with IBM and Atempo. This solution will be marketed as soon as November 2022 to provide customers with a secure storage solution for the very long term.

Deploying sustainable model on market
With a view to reducing its environmental impact, the SBG5 site benefits from the principles of frugality and efficiency refined by the company for over 20 years, especially its watercooling system for server components that participates in a water usage effectiveness (WUE) ratio below 0.2l/kWh, i.e. the equivalent of a glass of water to cool down a server during 10h of use. While the cloud industry average WUE reaches 1,8l/kWh ⁽¹⁾, the firm stands out thanks to its closed-circuit system that limits fluids waste, but also thanks to the use of dry coolers, and the absence of air conditioning in its servers’ rooms.

These innovations enable the group to reach a power usage effectiveness (PUE) index ranging from 1,1 to 1,2, 36% lower than the 1,57 ⁽²⁾ industry average according to 2021 estimations. By deploying a model that participates in reducing the energy consumed by cooling systems and fans, the company is one step ahead of the industry’s commitments towards the European Commission. This whole set of environmental requirements meets the highest expectations from the market and will pave the way for all the upcoming installations from the group.

Thanks to its factories located in Croix, France, and Beauharnois, Canada, the company has total control over the design and production of its servers, benefiting from advantages in terms of innovation, competitiveness, and resilience. With this vertically integrated model, the firm enjoys short, circular manufacturing circuits. French Regulatory Authority ARCEP, and French Agency for Ecological Transition, ADEME, both estimate that 78% of the cloud carbon footprint comes from manufacturing of hardware ⁽³⁾. The firm’s ability to refurbish and dismantle 100% of its components results in extending their lifecycle for constant innovation. The group is maintaining its efforts to optimize the use of resources and to better control the environmental impacts of its activities on the entire value chain, particularly in scope 3.

Growing and strengthening its global footprint
With the opening of SBG5 datacenter, the firm confirms the deployment of the industrial pillar of its growth acceleration plan.

This comprises the expansion of existing sites, but also new sites and new countries:

10th datacenter (RBX10) will be added to Roubaix’s campus
In Gravelines, the firm will deploy new capacities with GRA4
An AZ region (availability zone) with 3 datacenters located in the Paris Region will be setup during 1H23
In Germany, Limburg’s Campus will see the opening of LIM4 in 3Q23 to support local growth, while a new remote site will be launched for opening in 2024
As a result of the growth in North America, the group plans to expand the Beauharnois campus with its 9th datacenter (BHS9) and to open a new datacenter in Toronto in 2023
In Asia, which is also a fast-growing region for the company, the group will deploy its first datacenter in India, in Mumbai, before the end of the year, as well as a second datacentre in Singapore in 2023.

⁽¹⁾ Source : US Department of Energy
⁽²⁾Source : Uptime Institute
⁽³⁾ Evaluation de l’impact environnemental du numérique en France et analyse prospective