What Happened

In March 2021, a fire destroyed the SBG2 datacenter of OVH in Strasbourg. The neighboring SBG1 facility was also heavily damaged by firefighting efforts. Thousands of companies lost access to their servers and data. Many websites and applications remained offline for extended periods.

One of our clients had a production server in SBG2. It hosted both their public website and their store backend, including the point-of-sale system.

The Risk

Without a resilient setup, this kind of incident would typically lead to significant downtime, lost revenue, and customer frustration. In some cases, companies were unable to recover critical systems for weeks.

Our Solution

Taurix IT had implemented a high-availability infrastructure for this client using Proxmox VE. This included:

  • Live replication between datacenters using Proxmox
  • A secondary server located in a separate OVH datacenter in a different region
  • Daily off-site backups to a third datacenter in another country

When the fire occurred, our team immediately initiated a failover to the secondary server. Services were restored with minimal interruption to the client’s business operations.

The Outcome

The client experienced no data loss and was able to continue serving customers while much of the internet was still offline. Their business remained operational and stable during a period of crisis.

Why It Matters

This case highlights the importance of proactive infrastructure planning. With Taurix IT, even small and medium-sized businesses benefit from:

  • Affordable disaster recovery
  • Geo-redundant hosting with real-time replication
  • Daily off-site backups for added security
  • Direct access to experienced engineers who act fast when it matters