OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police OVH founder Octave Klaba says the police and insurers have UPSes, batteries and fuses extracted from the remains of its data centre that burned down the other week. In a video shared on Tuesday, Klaba said the electrical equipment has been removed from site and will be examined by experts, as will video of the fire that …
I'm not an OVH customer but to be fair at least three others I've used don't backup your stuff by default, it's a service you pay for. Quite reasonable as you might choose to take care of it yourself... as I did.
They also don't push you to install in two DCs, that's an option you can choose as you may want to use a 2nd DC from another provider.
So, it seems to me that a lot of these providers assume you know what you're doing....... and it seems a lot of OVH customers didn't :-)
Pedantic note: The power unit is Watt, not Volt
Even more pedantic note: Watts is not necessarily Volts x Amps and this is rather important if you're powering a data centre.
I know 'experts' who supply standby power-generators that really don't understand power factor and it's relationship with electrical power. They seem to have a locked-in reaction and that all loads have a power factor of 0.8, therefore you must have a bigger alternator. Which then runs at part-load.
+1 for the link to the paper. An interesting read.
The author of the paper is none other than the founder of APC!
"Neil Rasmussen is a Senior VP of Innovation for Schneider Electric"
"Prior to founding APC in 1981, Neil received his bachelors and masters degrees from MIT in electrical engineering, where he did his thesis on the analysis of a 200MW power supply for a tokamak fusion reactor...."
"Pedantic note: The power unit is Watt, not Volt."
That's comsumption. EDF installs power lines to industries by their voltage:
- small is your usual 220 V (mono-phased) or 380 V (tri-phased) like for habitations
- medium is indeed 20 kV
- high is 90 kV
And I don't think anything above is customer installable. 200 kV and 400 kV are only used for transport.
That's comsumption
Volt is the derived unit for electric potential, electric potential difference (voltage), and electromotive force. This is not a power unit.
Another pedantic note: today is the 211th birthday of the first improved voltaic pile. Thank you Mr Volta!
Unless I've missed one it sounds like we need another Reg unit of measure to track KV's in real world terms.
I usually think in hairdryers for power, as one hairdryer plus anything seems to trip the circuit at home
-KiloHairDryers or KHD's
-MegaHairDryers or MHD's
Toasters sound cooler though...hmmm
-KiloToasters = KT's
-MegaToasters = MT's
Our house was built 8 years ago and we have a 100A board fuse, and most of the day we get 248V although currently that's down to 239V which is more reasonable. I got a little concerned when it hit 252V (checked on 3 separate meters just to be sure) during the winter...
Is that really a kludge? We get our 220..240V from a trick with 120º out of phase 380V lines as well
That's in Europe, no idea about the UK (and amusingly, one country had a brief but fairly destructive 70's dalliance with requiring a fuse in the 0V neutral line).
There isn't a single standard for UK domestic properties, so need to check your installation. It was a problem in the mid 80's when people started fitting electric showers, cowboys would fit and run, because at the time many houses only had 60A supplies, with the shower requiring an upgrade to 80A, which in turn often meant new tails and consumer fusebox (hence why in many older properties you will see two consumer fuse boxes: the first one is for the new power-hungry circuit(s) and the second the original box serving the normal room lighting and power circuits..
> most of the day we get 248V although currently that's down to 239V
I was looking up UK mains voltage yesterday, it was harmonized back in 2003 to 230V, however the tolerances were changed (widened) and so the actual rate stayed much the same - which is exactly what you've seen.
It amused me to think of some UKIP'er giving a return to 'traditional' UK 240V mains as a benefit of BREXIT...
Well. I'm fairly sure the harmonized voltage was quite the "on paper" exercise in both the UK and Europe.
As you say the tolerances are widened to ensure that any electronics produces will run on 220 or 240 (and the actual tolerances of either grid).
Except, UPS might be an exception. I know I was in Romania and was buying a basic UPS. The buck/boost voltage thresholds were unquestionably based on 220v expected mains supply.
Eu standard is 230V +15-10%
The +15% is so that older 240V UK systems didn't need to be reset immediately
Some parts of Australia used 250V as the standard (NT and most BHP sites) with 240V still used in WA/QL
Just bear in mind if youi have incandescent lamps: +10% over rated voltage is - 50% on lifespan
(I had a house in a 230V country (NZ) which usually ran 252-256V at the outlets - Lights didn't get anywhere near the "1000 hours" mandated by the light bulb cartel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel - so I was an early adoptr of CFLs just on not having to change lamps onnce a month)
I can confirm this. I'm 15M from the substation. Some years ago I was blowing lightbulbs at quite a rate so I checked the mains voltage and the highest I saw was 256V. The electricity company wound it down a bit but it's always high.
I assume there's a voltage drop towards the end of the network and with lots of blocks of flats in the area, they crank it up so the people at the far end still get a useful supply.
> "I assume there's a voltage drop towards the end of the network and with lots of blocks of flats in the area, they crank it up so the people at the far end still get a useful supply."
If large power is going more than a hundred meters, they likely move it at higher voltage (13kV, 20kV) then step it down to 230V-240V for every few houses or a block. The 20kV:230V transformer typically has a lot of 5V taps *around* the nominal ratio. They should be able to put your service within a few Volts of whatever their company tells them to give you.
A 20kV line has MUCH less sag than a 230V line for the same power delivered. As the square of the voltage, in well-engineered systems.
15 meters from the substation is quite odd. However in the US it is not odd to be <50'/15m from a 100kVA transformer feeding four houses.
OTOH my small shack is fed through 500 feet/150m of minimum size Aluminum cable. (95A cable fused for 100A; yes, legal for practical purpose, especially here.) The company wisely tapped at 250V at the street. Here in the house I can see 249.9V idle and 208V on laundry day. The fix is obvious but not worth the price; my computers don't reboot and the light-flicker is mild.
I'm half a kilometre from the step down, a twisted quad cable delivers three phase to the house, with a nicely reliable 232V.
Before, I was closer to a different transformer, but it was a disaster. It struggled to reach 220V, and would often dip around 193V if I put the kettle on.
Looks across to the APC UPS...227 currently.
It was also around the 252 mark before Christmas, then we had a power glitch and it dropped to around 225-230 since.
I vaguely remember reading ages ago that the UK grid used auto transformers to do crude voltage corrections at the substations - no idea if this is true however.
UK based
> "remember reading ages ago that the UK grid used auto transformers to do crude voltage corrections at the substations"
Substations (large installation at the edge of town) have correction, manual if very well connected, automatic if sag and droop is a problem.
In the USA, intermediate points like a neighborhood or a street or even an isolated customer can sometimes have automatic correction. This has been mature since the 1930s. It is the first reaction when load growth exceeds installed cable.
UST sells industrial (indoors) correctors. Power companies run to outdoor types but they work the same inside.
https://ustpower.com/
https://ustpower.com/comparing-automatic-voltage-regulation-technologies/avr-guide-mechanical-type-voltage-regulator/avr-guide-tap-changing-voltage-regulator-operation/
The classic machine has sensitive relays (now often a microcontroller) and a motor turning the tap-switch. Sitting at the end of the line, neglected, these eventually turn bad. Say it has to turn-up to cover the diner/evening load. Then sticks. After midnight when the load falls way off, the "117V" can rise to 130V, even 140V.
And I worked a place where the relays were miscalibrated. The voltage would stagger 118-114-118-114 most of the day.
But when working right it is a handy tool in a power company's operations.
What does this translate to in kW? The way domestic electricity is done in France is that you pay for a level of consumption. My setup will click out over 9kW. I can have less (6kW) or more (12kW, and 15kW I think). Some guy used to come and fiddle with the trip switch, but with smart meters it's probably just a quick blast of data and upgraded. Nothing else changes, except you get billed more...of course.
" The way domestic electricity is done in France is that you pay for a level of consumption"
if you're billed a "level" then you tend to use that level regardess (all you can eat conundrum). That's why most places meter your kWh and bill based on that (or if you're a larger site, your peak power and power factors in a complex formula. It can be cheaper to fire up 50c/kWh diesels for a short period than allow your mains peak to exceeed limits as it clicks you onto higher tariff levels.
The electricity market is byzantine and deliberately hard to decode
if you're billed a "level" then you tend to use that level regardess (all you can eat conundrum). That's why most places meter your kWh
France meters kWh, it's the "standing charge" (In Euros, not Coulombs!) which varies with the agreed level. If you order a 6kW connection you'll pay less, but run the risk that it will trip if you boil a kettle at the same time as the oven & hot water heater are on. They even have special circuit breakers that can be set to the pre-arranged limit and will shed less important loads to stay under it.
It's a common misconception that UK houses have 100A connections as standard. Houses built within (at a guess) the last 15 years or so where a new transformer connection has been made (or a new transformer installed) rather than simply tapping into an existing LV (i.e. 230V nominal) supply will probably have 100A service cutouts (main fuses) but other than that it's not terribly common, with many houses having 80A cutouts in urban areas and 60A being common elsewhere, especially with overhead lines.
The confusion probably arises because all switchgear since sometime in the 1970s must be rated for 100A and is marked as such, and very often the cutout's fuse carrier next to the meter will be marked 100A even though the actual fuse is a lower value.
We rebuilt our house over the last couple of years, and when the electricity supply was reconnected this is exactly what happened to us; they simply tapped into the existing underground cable, and although the brand new supply cutout, meter and main switch are all rated for 100A and the fuse carrier has a "100A" label on it, the fuse that is actually fitted is 80A.
In my Part-P days I even saw one installation - admittedly probably dating from the 1940s - which had a 40A supply cutout.
In practice, and particularly because UK housing stock has traditionally been solid-fuel or (now) gas heated, rather than electrically heated, it's not normally an issue. 100A is theoretically capable of supplying 23kW (resistive) continuously and even 60A can manage 14kW or so, which is enough to run an electric shower and not worry about cooking or watching TV or mowing the lawn at the same time, and if you have a gas boiler why would you install an electric shower anyway?
What no-one in government seems to have realised though is that it will become an issue quite soon, especially if new gas boilers are banned. Air- or ground-source heat pumps will add a load to each house roughly equivalent to running an electric shower, and "electric boilers" with ratings up to 24kW are a whole other ball game. Then you have to consider electric car charging, where a typical domestic installation is again about the same power output as an electric shower (32A - 7½kW) and things begin to look really tight.
Western Power Distribution is promoting Superfast Electricity (1.4MB PDF) which basically means installing three phase supplies domestically. That's only realistically possible for new housing developments and would be enormously expensive and disruptive (certainly new LV infrastructure - transformers and cables, possibly even new 11kV* infrastructure) to retrofit to the whole of the UK.
I'm told that many European countries have been supplying three phase domestically for many years and you do often find electric cookers with three phase connection panels, tied together for UK use.
M.
*I see above that apparently 20kV is common in Europe as the last HV stage before LV transformers. In the UK the last HV stage is usually 11kV
>Western Power Distribution is promoting Superfast Electricity which basically means installing three phase supplies domestically.
I was under the impression that the UK domestic mains distribution was already three phase, with each house only being connected to a single phase. So not so sure about the benefits of going from three neighbours being on different phases to three neighbours all using the same three phases. Personally, I would have thought the disadvantages would outweigh the advantages.
You're a bit late to the debate but ok, I'll bite.
Summary: the idea is that if each phase can supply (up to) 100A to your house, if all three are made available your house can then consume the equivalent of 300A. For a 100% electricity-powered house, that is one with electric heating, electric cooking and an electric car as well as the TVs, computers, hair dryers etc., 100A can be marginal sometimes.
Detail: with three phases available you would no longer have to worry about turning the car charger on at the same time as the electric shower, because you could put the car charger on one phase and the electric shower on another - assuming all appliances stay single phase.
One appliance which could easily benefit from three phase power though is that car charger. At the moment most domestic car chargers are limited to 32A - about 7kW - charging. This is so that if you do have the shower on when the charger needs to work (as might be the case at bedtime, for example) there is enough "headroom" left to run the rest of the household's appliances without risking blowing the service cutout. Yes I know that modern car chargers are "intelligent" and can sense this sort of conflict, but the principle stands.
If the charger were to run on all three phases at 32A per phase - a relatively trivial swap from an installation wiring point of view - then by the time the electronics have worked their wizardry that's the equivalent of a single-phase charger running at 96A, i.e. 22kW, and there is still lots of capacity available for everything else you might possibly need to run in the house - especially if you are careful to distribute single-phase loads evenly across the phases, i.e. put your cooker on a different phase to your shower and the heat pump on a different phase again.
Or maybe a market will open up for three phase domestic appliances. Many electric cookers are already two- or three-phase capable, with separate supplies going to different heating elements which in the UK are just connected together. A domestic heat pump running at 3x16A would have more power available than one running from 1x32A, for example, and if you really must run an electric shower you will get a lot more hot water from 3x20A = 13.8kW than you currently do from a typical domestic shower which is usually around 8½kW (fused at 40A) with the added benefit of being able to use a much easier to install 3 phase 2.5mm² cable, rather than the cumbersome 10mm² necessary for a 40A circuit.
At 7kW, a "big battery" Nissan Leaf will take about 11½ hours to charge. With an appropriately-designed charger (the Nissan website only gives information about 2½kW, 7kW and 50kW charging options so I'm kinda extrapolating here), 22kW could fill the same battery in about 4 hours. Imagine a two-car household; it's the difference between being able to fully charge both cars overnight, and having to choose only to part-charge one or both cars.
And in the scenario where EVs are used as grid backup batteries or Tesla's Powerwall system is installed, you can absorb and deliver more energy more quickly.
Of course, the big downside is that the supply infrastructure has to change to accommodate the potentially higher peak loads. This is why it has always been expensive to have 3 phase installed domestically (in the 1970s it was fashionable to have pottery, enamelling or glasswork kilns in your garage, or maybe you had a metalworking shop and needed to keep its supply separate from the house) and why it would be impossible just to dig up the existing cable (or shin up the nearest pole) and run an extra couple of wires to every house. Hence these experiments with new housing developments. It doesn't really address the expense of retrofitting 3 phase to existing properties.
While you wouldn't need to install three times as much cable as normal (because not everyone will be using all the electricity all of the time) you will definitely need to move up a size, and likewise with the 230V transformer and possibly with the 11kV supply to that transformer too.
I have however thought of a possible compromise; if the existing infrastructure is designed to supply 100A to each house on a single phase, changing that to 3x60A would still give a useful uplift in capacity (from 23kW to 41kW) while not increasing the potential demand on each phase as much as providing 3x100A would. Many houses would have to be rewired though, in order to distribute loads across the phases.
M.
>"Summary: the idea is that if each phase can supply (up to) 100A to your house, if all three are made available your house can then consume the equivalent of 300A"
There is also this reason:
Under Engineering Recommendation G83, single phase connections currently restricts domestic export to 3.68kW AC of solar PV per phase on their rooftops, without seeking DNO permission.
[https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/rea_calls_for_three_phase_connections_for_all_new_homes_to_unlock_solar_dep]
Which effectively places a limit on the amount of electricity a householder can export to the grid. Which in turn basically means a 4kW solar panel system (circa 28m2) is the largest that can be installed before additional works become necessary.
Which would seem to suggest that some would like to put larger solar arrays on roofs (owned and operated by the DNO - given it is WPD & REA proposing the change).
>"...changing that to 3x60A would still give a useful uplift in capacity"
That could work, the simplest solution would be to put say the shower and cooker on different phases, which given these already have dedicated circuits shouldn't be too difficult. Leaving only the car charging port to straddle all phases.
But as you note upgrading the infrastructure and the retro fit is the difficult part and would probably make the cost of universal fibre look cheap. Personally, I think there is more mileage in domestic level storage etc. which requires not infrastructure upgrade and would potentially significantly reduce the power I need to draw from the grid - which ultimately means less revenue and profit to the DNO's et al...
My panel here in my house in Seattle has two 115 volt lines, 180° out of phase, and 100A per line, for a total possible 23kVA.
My water heater, tumble dryer and oven are all connected across the phases, applying 230V to their respective heating elements. This is fairly typical for a modern home in the U.S.
In my (wood) workshop, I have a single phase 230V dust collector connected via a 1:1 isolation transformer wired across the phases. This is not typical.
Similar arrangement here in Oregon. In fact I just recently replaced a 50 gallon water heater (1x 30A dual-pole 230V breaker) with a tankless heater (2x 40A DP, added new uprated 8AWG wiring at the same time).
Like a lot of houses though, mine is seriously running out of space in the breaker panels. I plan to replace another tank heater with a higher-capacity tankless, so somehow I'm going to have to find space for a pair of 50A DP breakers. Fun. At least I have 200A line breakers on my panels.
"providing you take the proper precautions. "
Like very strong separations between the UPS and the resr of the building
I've been (too) closely involved in the failure of a UPS which took out a building when it burned up. There are good reasons for putting high power ones well away from everything else
Just factor in, these ups are most likely the same size as a small house. Where I worked, the back up generators were the size of two containers. And there were three of them. That's because the house sized battery plants (two of them), could only support the servers and ac for about 20 mins.
I've been trying to get someone of authority to take a look at OVH for some time to no avail.
Perhaps all the abuse complaints from millions of victims came flooding in all at one time causing overload?
I also don't think that some of OVH's "customers" would appreciate having backups of what they host on there.
let it burn
Just rummaged around the first two IP addresses listed.
The first appears to be an outfit offering anonymous VPN, while the second is a Tor exit node. This information came from other sources, such as abuseipdb because in both cases scamalytics reported the addresses as "server" rather than VPN or Tor. Can we trust a service that can't correctly identify what it is looking at?
That's not to say it's not a wretched hive of depravity (abuseipdb has numerous bad reports), but these are people abusing Tor or the VPN, not the services themselves, or the hosting provider.
More probably ought to be done to clear up the dreck, but then the very nature of things like that is anonymity, is it not?
I had assumed over the last couple of days that some of OVH's customers were getting back on line.
My brute force monitor had pretty well stopped working for a few days last week, but it's back showing lots of failed incoming connections again. Mainly from old usernames that were deleted years ago.
So,
1. Some PR wag decided that the figure '20kV' is a measure of capacity. Ooo! a big number! Tell that to the punters. They'll be really impressed!
2. If that were a typo, then 20kW would just about power 40-50 servers.
Given that meaningless twaddle, would anyone trust what backup actually means?
this has reminded me of the huge shiny 'whole server room' ups i had installed years ago to protect some early cryptography providing servers... it was a beaut with full Quatermass style switches to take loads on/offline
The installers (nameless to protect the innocent) did a great job, did a demo of full power failure mode and left
Strangely we then experienced outages EVERY night!! the servers would all die at around 5am and spring back alive at 7am?!?!? puzzling...
Turns out the numpty installers had pinched the new power feed for the system from a 'spare' breaker they happened upon... not noticing the timer right next to it in the dist box labelled 'Air-con system'
power was being killed each weekday at 7pm but the big old ups did its thing until dying at around 5am.... then at 7am the timer kicked the mains on and off it went again!
Backup "everything"? That will take a nice chunk of infrastructure - network, servers, storage, ... Though de-duplication can cut storage down quite a bit on copies of the same OS.
But will you have to install agents in my machines? How will you still get me the CPU power I paid for if your agent starts sucking at peak loads? You better not lock any of my files. Will my system ever stall during a snapshot? For virtual machines you could play games with the block storage they live in. But what about where I bought dedicated bare metal?
What about my databases? A file system level agent (or a block storage snapshot) cannot be assumed to get consistent images, of that application specific file structure, that can be restored to a usable database. Will you have agents for every database engine? How will that agent "pause" the database between transactions to get a consistent image? For engines that do not have an appropriate API, how will you do a dump-to-disk for a file system level copy? Would that take away from the storage space I have paid for to hold my applications?
How will you test restores? A backup is not a valid backup until it has been tested.
AAAARRRGGGG t h e h o r r o r
I have not been in a Backup Team for awhile, but still get damn flashbacks.
I'd rather have a possibly inconsistent backup of a database than none as some of their customers now have.
Many database architectures will perform a recover automatically so it is consistent, in fact its actually a backup strategy, so if is critical you should be using a database architecture that can handle it or have a way of managing it.
If you've a database then presumably at some point you perform some form of clean backup to a disk somewhere so as long as that is backed up you don't have an issue.
If you think inconsistency is an issue how do you cope with a server crash, major disk/array failure or a total power outage?
The best solution is probably to replicate it off site and then backup that database, you can then shut it down without affecting your availability, back it up and carry on replicating.
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