With the inauguration of its new Strasbourg Datacenter, OVHcloud unveils its latest generation of hyper-resilient and sustainable Datacenters
STRASBOURG, France–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Regulatory news:
OVHcloud (Paris:OVH), European Cloud leader, today inaugurates its new datacenter in Strasbourg: SBG5. During this event, held in the presence of the Minister of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, Bruno Le Maire, the Minister Delegate for Digital Transition and Telecommunications Jean-Noël Barrot, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market , Thierry Breton, as well as representatives of local authorities and the French Cloud industry, the group unveiled the extent of the innovations resulting from its hyper-resilience plan as well as the measures deployed to significantly reduce the environmental footprint of its infrastructure. As part of its strategic plan, OVHcloud confirms the opening of 15 sites by 2024, to provide its customers with innovative IaaS and PaaS solutions in a trusted and sustainable environment. This ambitious industrial policy will allow the Group to expand existing sites, conquer new geographies, but also address new use cases thanks to a hyper-resilient and sustainable model.
“In a booming market, OVHcloud stands out for its ability to deploy innovative solutions at the best value for money, 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 defend the European values of an open, trustworthy and sustainable cloud, with our customers around the world. Our local roots and our constant investment in the territories allows us to strengthen our position in the employment areas to bring in new skills”, said Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud.
Bruno Le Maire and Jean-Noel Barrot declared “The opening of this new, less energy-intensive datacenter marks an essential step in the development of OVHcloud. Thus, the company is positioned at the heart of French and European digital sovereignty that the Government has been helping to build since 2017. . It demonstrates the resilience and innovation of the French cloud ecosystem and confirms the choice that France has made to retain full control of its data.”
SBG5: first realization of the hyper-resilience plan
SBG5 is the first data center whose design stems from the hyper-resilience plan defined in April 2021, and representing an investment of 30 million euros. The site, with an area of 1,700 m2, has 19 isolated rooms benefiting from masonry to compartmentalize the segments offering fire resistance up to two hours. The gas fire extinguishing system is rated APSAD R13 and the VESDA smoke detection is rated APSAD R7. The 7 energy rooms and 3 battery rooms are located outside the building.
Hyper-resilience principles applied to the SBG5 data center
In accordance with its commitments, the Group will launch a new datacenter dedicated to raw data backups (snapshots), remote from the service operating sites. First deployed for French customers, the Group intends to extend this service to its entire range of solutions and locations.
In addition to this remote storage solution, OVHcloud offers a variety of services to facilitate backup and disaster recovery, such as Veeam Enterprise for securing the company by backing up mission-critical workloads (VMWare, physical servers Windows/Linux or NAS), and Zerto for backing up and restoring virtual machines as part of disaster recovery plans on Hosted Private Cloud infrastructures.
Finally, OVHcloud will launch a new storage service in November 2022 – Cold Archive – a hyper-resilient solution at a very competitive price. This service will allow companies to store so-called “cold” data over the long term, while benefiting from maximum security and reliability.
The benefit is based on:
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4 mini datacenters spread throughout France with at least 200km distance between sites. As each site is interconnected, a permanent backup level is guaranteed with redundancy mechanisms, whatever the situation.
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A resilient tape archiving solution, developed in partnership with IBM and Atempo. This solution will be marketed from November 2022 to provide customers with an ultra-secure storage solution over the very long term.
Deploy the most sustainable model on the market
With a view to reducing its environmental impact, the SBG5 site benefits from the principles of frugality and efficiency refined by OVHcloud for more than 20 years, in particular its water cooling system for server components which contributes to a ratio of efficiency of use of water (WUE) less than 0.2l/kWh, i.e. the equivalent of a glass of water to cool a server for 10 hours of use. While the cloud industry average WUE reaches 1.8l/kWh1OVHcloud stands out thanks to its closed circuit system which limits the waste of fluids, but also thanks to the use of air coolers and the absence of air conditioning in its server rooms.
These innovations enable the Group to achieve an energy efficiency index (PUE) ranging from 1.1 to 1.2, 36% lower than the 1.572 industry average based on 2021 estimates. By deploying a model that helps reduce the energy consumed by cooling systems and fans, OVHcloud is getting a head start on industry commitments to screw of the European Commission. This set of environmental requirements meets the highest market expectations and will pave the way for all the Group’s future facilities.
Thanks to its factories located in Croix in France and Beauharnois in Canada, OVHcloud fully controls the design and production of its servers, benefiting from significant advantages in terms of innovation, competitiveness and resilience. With this vertically integrated model, OVHcloud benefits from short and circular manufacturing circuits. The French regulatory authority ARCEP and the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME) both estimate that 78% of the Cloud’s carbon footprint comes from the manufacture of hardware3. OVHcloud’s ability to recondition and dismantle 100% of its components translates into an extension of their lifespan for constant innovation. The Group is continuing its efforts to optimize the use of resources and better control the environmental impacts of its activities across the entire value chain, particularly in scope 3.
Grow and strengthen its global footprint
With the opening of the SBG5 datacenter, OVHcloud confirms the deployment of the industrial pillar of its growth acceleration plan. This includes the extension of existing sites, but also new sites and new countries:
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A tenth datacenter (RBX10) will be added to the Roubaix campus
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In Gravelines, OVHcloud will deploy new capacities with GRA4
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An AZ region (area of availability) with three datacenters located in Île-de-France will be set up during the first half of 2023
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In Germany, the Limburg campus will see the opening of LIM4 in Q3 2023 to support local growth, while a new remote site will be launched for opening in 2024
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Due to strong growth in North America, the Group plans to expand the Beauharnois campus with its ninth data center (BHS9) and to open a new data center in Toronto in 2023
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In Asia, which is also a strong growth region for OVHcloud, the Group will deploy its first datacenter in India, in Mumbai, before the end of the year, as well as a second datacenter in Singapore in 2023.
About OVHcloud
OVHcloud is a global player and the leading European cloud provider operating 400,000 servers in more than 33 data centers on four continents. For 20 years, the Group has relied on an integrated model that allows complete control of our value chain, from the design of our servers to the management of our data centers through the orchestration of our fiber optic network. This unique approach allows OVHcloud to independently cover the full spectrum of use cases for our 1.6 million customers in 140 countries. OVHcloud now offers its customers next-generation solutions that combine high performance, predictable pricing and complete data sovereignty to support their growth without hindrance.
1 Source: US Department of Energy
2 Source: Uptime Institute
3 https://www.arcep.fr/uploads/tx_gspublication/etude-numerique-environnement-ademe-arcep-note-synthese_janv2022.pdf