OVHcloud

Last updated
OVH Groupe SA
Company type Public ( Société anonyme )
Euronext Paris:  OVH
ISIN FR0014005HJ9
Industry Cloud computing, hosting
Founded2 November 1999;25 years ago (1999-11-02) [1]
Headquarters
Roubaix
,
France
Key people
  • Octave Klaba
    (Founder, chairman) [2]
  • Michel Paulin
    (CEO)
  • Henryk Klaba
    (President)
  • Miroslaw Klaba
    (R&D director)
Products VPS, dedicated hosting service, cloud computing, public cloud, private cloud, web hosting, DSL
RevenueIncrease2.svg €897 million (2023)
−40,320,000 Euro (2023)  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Number of employees
2,900 (2023)  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
ASN 16276 OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website Official website OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

OVH, legally OVH Groupe SA, is a French cloud computing company which offers VPS, dedicated servers, and other web services. As of 2016 OVH owned the world's largest data center in surface area. [3] As of 2019, it was the largest hosting provider in Europe, [4] [5] and the third largest in the world based on physical servers. [6] According to W3Techs, OVH has 3.4% of website data center market share in 2024. [7] The company was founded in 1999 [1] by the Klaba family and is headquartered in Roubaix, France. [8] In 2019 OVH adopted OVHcloud as its public brand name. [9]

Contents

History and growth

OVH was founded in November 1999 [1] by Octave Klaba, with the help of three family members (Henry, Haline, and Miroslaw).

In August 2023, it was announced OVHcloud was in exclusive negotiations for the acquisition of the Cologne-headquartered edge computing software company, gridscale GmbH. [10]

Funding

In October 2016, OVH raised $250 million in order to raise further international expansion. [11] This funding round valued OVH at over US$1 billion. In the fiscal year of 2016, OVH reportedly had around $343 million in revenue. In 2018 OVH announced its five-year plans to triple investment starting in 2021. Which represent between 4.6 and $8.1 billion U.S. dollars (4 to 7 billion euros). [12]

In October 2021, OVHcloud filed its IPO and is listed on the Euronext Paris, the Paris Stock Exchange [13] as OVH. In December 2021, OVHcloud became part of the Paris SBF120 index. [14]

Operations

As of 2021, OVH had 30 data centers in 19 countries hosting 300,000 servers. [15] [16] The company offers localized services such as customer service offices in many European countries, as well as in North America, Africa, and Singapore. [17] As of 2019, OVH is considered one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world, with over a million customers and one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world, [18] and a network capacity totaling over 20 Tbit/s

As of 2017, OVH was known for its offering of email hosting service, [19] considered one of the largest in the world, [20] in addition to its general Internet hosting services.

OVH uses in-house design and manufacturing, including custom-made servers (based on standard components) and a modular shipping container architecture. In 2019, the Canadian data center (Beauharnois, Quebec) was considered a leading example of the OVH model. [21]

Partnerships

As of 2016, OVH was one of the sponsors for Let's Encrypt, a free TLS encryption service, [22] [23] and OVH's hardware supplier is Super Micro Computer Inc. [24]

Incidents

In March 2021, OVH suffered a large fire at its datacenter in Strasbourg, France. [25] SBG2 had been built in 2016 with a capacity of 30 thousand physical servers. [26] SBG2 was declared a total loss, with early reports indicating damage to SBG1, and services across all four Strasbourg locations experiencing disruptions. [27] The company's chairman, Octave Klaba, took to Twitter to confirm that all its staff were safe. [28] All customer data and backups stored in SBG2 were lost. [29] SBG1 was damaged partially while SBG4 remained intact, and SBG3 was intact but without power, though the servers at the latter sites were taken offline temporarily. [30] [28] In September 2021, the company filed a report [31] with the Autorité des marchés financiers documenting the estimated damage at about €105 million. [32] In 2023, OVH was ordered to pay €250,000 to two customers that had lost data, and more than 130 other customers are engaged in a class-action lawsuit against the company. [29]

In October 2021, the company had a worldwide outage across all their networks due to a human error. [33]

Controversies

WikiLeaks

In December 2010, French Gizmodo edition revealed that WikiLeaks selected OVH as its new hosting provider, following Amazon's refusal to host it. [34] [35] [36] On December 3, the growing controversy prompted Eric Besson, France's Industry Minister, to inquire about legal ways to prohibit this hosting in France. The attempt failed. On December 6, 2010, a judge ruled that there was no need for OVH to cease hosting WikiLeaks. [37] The case was rejected on the grounds that such a case required an adversarial hearing. [38]

Environmental impact

OVH started to integrate innovative water cooling in 2003 for its servers. [39]

OVH relies in large part on nuclear power, in particular their Gravelines data centre is known for being located next to the Gravelines Nuclear Power Station. [40] [41]

In January 2021, OVH with other industry players joined the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, which is a pledge to achieve climate neutrality of datacenters before 2030. [42]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Content delivery network</span> Layer in the internet ecosystem addressing bottlenecks

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as the Internet was starting to become a mission-critical medium for people and enterprises. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects, downloadable objects, applications, live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites.

DreamHost is a Los Angeles-based web hosting provider and domain name registrar. It is owned by New Dream Network, LLC, founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and registered in 1997 by Michael Rodriguez. DreamHost began hosting customers' sites in 1997. In May 2012, DreamHost spun off Inktank. Inktank is a professional services and support company for the open source Ceph file system. In November 2014, DreamHost spun off Akanda, an open source network virtualization project. As of February 2016, Dreamhost employs about 200 people and has close to 400,000 customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Infomart</span> Office in Texas, United States

The Equinix Infomart is one of the largest buildings in Dallas, Texas (USA). It houses mainly enterprise companies and data center providers. The building is supplied by five independent electric feeds to three separate electrical substations. It is also one of the most digitally connected buildings in the world, with over 8,700 strands of fiber optic cabling.

Hostway is a global web hosting and technology infrastructure company headquartered in Austin, Texas, United States. It provides hosting services to individuals, small to medium-sized businesses, and large corporations with web sites, databases, business applications, and managed web hosting. Hostway Services Inc. merged with Hosting.com in January 2019. The merged company rebranded to Ntirety in September 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud</span> Cloud computing platform

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.

Ceph is a free and open-source software-defined storage platform that provides object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. Ceph provides distributed operation without a single point of failure and scalability to the exabyte level. Since version 12 (Luminous), Ceph does not rely on any other conventional filesystem and directly manages HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can expose a POSIX filesystem.

GlobalSign is a certificate authority and a provider of internet identity and security products. As of January 2015, Globalsign was the 4th largest certificate authority in the world, according to Netcraft.

vCloud Air was a public cloud computing service built on vSphere from VMware. vCloud Air has three "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) subscription service types: dedicated cloud, virtual private cloud, and disaster recovery. vCloud Air also offers a pay-as-you-go service named Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared internet-based computing

"Cloud computing is a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand." according to ISO. "Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." according to the NIST.

Internap Holding LLC, formerly Internap Corporation and operating as INAP, is a company that sells data center and cloud computing services. The company is headquartered in Norcross, Georgia, United States, and has data centers located in North America, EMEA and the Asia-Pacific region. INAP sells its Performance IP, hosting, cloud, colocation and hybrid infrastructure services through Private Network Access Points (P-NAP) in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Australia.

The following is a comparison of cloud-computing software and providers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DigitalOcean</span> American cloud infrastructure provider

DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.

Hetzner Online GmbH is a company and data center operator based in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, in Germany.

HostDime Global Corp is a global data center infrastructure provider offering an array of cloud products including physical bare metal servers, virtualized cloud servers, and colocation services. HostDime's data centers are carrier-neutral facilities in global edge locations.

In computer networking, a bare-metal server is a physical computer server that is used by one consumer, or tenant, only. Each server offered for rental is a distinct physical piece of hardware that is a functional server on its own. They are not virtual servers running in multiple pieces of shared hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scaleway</span> French cloud computing company

Scaleway is a French Cloud computing and web hosting company, founded by Xavier Niel in 1999 and a majority owned subsidiary of the Iliad group. The company provides physical dedicated servers and cloud computing architectures through Scaleway Dedibox and Scaleway Elements brands, domain registration services through the BookMyName brand, and colocation services in its datacenters through the brand Scaleway Datacenters. The company mostly caters towards the low end market in terms of quality and pricing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ampere Computing</span> American fabless semiconductor company

Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. It was founded in 2017 by Renée James.

Shadow.tech is a cloud computing service developed by the French company Blade that was acquired by OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba in 2021. Its technology is based on Windows 10 servers executing video games or other Windows software applications remotely. Unlike many other cloud services such as Nvidia GeForce Now, or Amazon Luna, Shadow is not limited to running video games, as Shadow.tech provides remote access to a complete PC infrastructure.

The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact is a pledge of industry players and trade association of cloud infrastructure services and data centres in Europe to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. It is supported by the European Commission and Frans Timmermans, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Clabaugh, Jeff (2016-10-06). "French firm to open 1st US data center in Fauquier Co". WTOP . Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  2. ↑ "OVH reorganises its governance to support new acceleration phase". OVH.
  3. ↑ Wood, Eric Emin (2016-10-12). "Why OVH opened the world's largest datacenter in the Great White North". www.itworldcanada.com. International Data Group, Inc. (IDG) IT World Canada. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  4. ↑ MSV, Janakiram (2019-05-26). "How VMware Is Transforming Itself Into a Multi-Cloud Company". Forbes . Archived from the original on 2019-06-19. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  5. ↑ Coop, Alex (2019-08-27). "Canadian customers' heads are still in the clouds, and so is VMware's | Financial Post". Financial Post . Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  6. ↑ Sarraf, Samira (2017-05-12). "World's third-largest hosting provider OVH opens Melbourne office". CRN Australia. nextmedia. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  7. ↑ "Usage statistics of OVH as data center provider". 2024-06-08. Retrieved 2024-06-08.
  8. ↑ Rosemain, Mathieu; Barzic, Gwénaëlle (2018-10-18). "France's OVH to triple spending to take on Google, Amazon in cloud computing". Reuters . Archived from the original on 2019-11-07. Retrieved 2019-11-07.
  9. ↑ "For its 20th anniversary, OVH takes off and becomes OVHcloud". 10 October 2019.
  10. ↑ "OVHcloud on the edge of glory in new market with Germany acquisition". www.channelweb.co.uk. 2023-08-08. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
  11. ↑ "OVH Partners with KKR and TowerBrook for Further Global Expansion". exithub. Retrieved 9 January 2017.
  12. ↑ Rosemain, Mathieu; Barzic, Gwénaëlle (2018-10-18). "France's OVH to triple spending to take on Google, Amazon in cloud..." Reuters . Archived from the original on 2019-09-07. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  13. ↑ "Shares in French tech champion OVHcloud gain 6% in Paris debut". Reuters. 15 October 2021.
  14. ↑ "OVHcloud Joins SBF 120 Index Following Euronext Paris Review | MarketScreener". 10 December 2021.
  15. ↑ "About - OVH Canada". OVH. Archived from the original on 2018-07-09. Retrieved 2018-07-09.
  16. ↑ "Datacenters: Security and infrastructure | OVHcloud".
  17. ↑ Williams, Mike; Turner, Brian (2019-08-26). "Best dedicated server hosting providers of 2019". TechRadar . Archived from the original on 2019-09-06. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  18. ↑ Max Smolaks (2019-04-29). "OVH pulls gloves off bare metal fighters as it eyes up US cloud vendors". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  19. ↑ David Legrand (2017-03-27). "OVH lance une offre E-mail Pro basée sur Microsoft Exchange... mais sans ActiveSync". www.nextinpact.com (in French). Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  20. ↑ "Press release for market report". 2020. Archived from the original on 2021-03-21. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  21. ↑ "Beauharnois data centre a model of OVH DIY scale". insightaas.com. 2019-03-05. Retrieved 2021-03-12.
  22. ↑ Lomas, Natasha (2016-04-12). "Let's Encrypt free HTTPS certification push exits beta". TechCrunch . Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-16.
  23. ↑ Gilbert, Guillaume (December 22, 2015). "OVH Commits to Let's Encrypt to Provide Free SSL Certificates". OVH.COM. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
  24. ↑ Mawad, Marie (2018-10-18). "OVH Keeps Super Micro as Supplier, Vets Hardware In-House". www.bloomberg.com. Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 2020-02-22. Retrieved 2019-09-06.
  25. ↑ Rosemain, Mathieu (2021-03-10). "Blaze destroys servers at Europe's largest cloud services firm". Reuters. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  26. ↑ "OVH Strasbourg Campus Data Center". baxtel.com.
  27. ↑ Sharwood, Simon (2021-03-10). "OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable". The Register. Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  28. 1 2 Miller, Rich (2021-03-11). "OVH Data Center in France Destroyed by Fire, All Staff Safe" . Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  29. 1 2 Judge, Peter (22 March 2023). "OVHcloud ordered to pay €250k to two customers who lost data in Strasbourg data center fire". Datacentre Dynamics. Retrieved 15 March 2024.
  30. ↑ Sverdlik, Yevgeniy (2021-03-10). "CEO Says Fire Has Destroyed OVH's Strasbourg Data Center (SBG2)" . Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  31. ↑ "DOCUMENT D'ENREGISTREMENT" [Document of Registration](PDF) (in French). OVHCloud Group. 17 September 2021. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-10-16. Retrieved 12 October 2021.
  32. ↑ Peter Judge (29 September 2021). "Fire could cost OVHcloud €105 million, IPO filing reveals". Data Center Dynamics. Retrieved 12 October 2021.
  33. ↑ @olesovhcom (13 October 2021). "Suite à une erreur humaine durant la reconfiguration du network sur notre DC à VH (US-EST), nous avons un souci sur…" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  34. ↑ Greenberg, Andy (September 13, 2012). This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Hacktivists, and Cypherpunks Are Freeing the World's Information. New York (New York), USA: Random House. ISBN   978-0-753-54801-1. Archived from the original on September 7, 2019. Retrieved 2015-07-23. Within days, they had registered the URL and set up an SSLprotected site and a Tor Hidden Service in an OVH data center in the French city of Roubaix, the same one that briefly housed WikiLeaks' publications until they migrated to Sweden.
  35. ↑ Vinocur, Nick; Love, Brian (2010-12-03). "France seeks to bar hosting WikiLeaks website". Reuters . Archived from the original on 2019-09-08. Retrieved 2019-09-08.
  36. ↑ Greenberg, Andy (2010-12-03). "Despite Attacks, WikiLeaks' Swedish Host Won't Budge". Forbes . Archived from the original on 2016-03-05.
  37. ↑ "French web host need not shut down WikiLeaks site: judge". Agence France-Presse (AFP) . 2010-12-06. Archived from the original on 2013-01-03. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  38. ↑ "Following the wikileaks case". OVH. 6 December 2010. Archived from the original on 15 March 2012. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
  39. ↑ "Servers on Demand: Custom Water-Cooled Servers in One Hour". Data Center Knowledge. September 16, 2013.
  40. ↑ Julien Costagliola di Fiore (2017-05-04). "Energy efficient datacenter" (PDF). OVH.
  41. ↑ Teva Meyer (2017-12-11). "Le nucléaire et le territoire : regards sur l'intégration spatiale des centrales en France" (in French). ENS Lyon.
  42. ↑ Sterin, François (2021-01-21). "5 keys to understand the Climate Neutral Datacenter Pact". OVHcloud Blog. Retrieved 2021-09-15.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.