The incumbent operator said that the new data centre, in the Gola Sefer district of the capital, Addis Ababa, was supplied by Huawei.
“The newly built data centre will firstly serve existing service provision such as mobile money and business support systems, and the extra capacity could be used for new business such as colocation and cloud service in the future,” said Ethio Telecom.
Chen Mingliang (pictured, left), CEO of Huawei’s Ethiopian operation, and Ethio Telecom’s CEO Frehiwot Tamiru (pictured, right) opened the building for operation.
Ethio Telecom, which is shortly to face competition from South Africa’s MTN as well as from a Vodafone-led consortium, said it had chosen a modular approach, thanks to its short delivery period and high energy saving ratio.
The company said Huawei delivered the data centre within two and a half months, while the traditional way of deployment would take more than five months.
The power usage effectiveness (PUE) is 1.4, said Ethio Telecom, 25% less than for a traditional data centre. The installation uses a Huawei NetEco power monitoring system, which can further reduce operation and maintenance cost by 35%.
Huawei and its Chinese rival, ZTE, are the main telecoms network equipment suppliers to Ethio Telecom.
