Oct 14 , 2023
Financial industry insiders convened at the Sheraton Hotel to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of the Raxio-Tier III data centre last week. Slated to launch before the end of the year, Raxio plans to operate with three megawatts and 800 racks and is the first data centre to be certified by the uptime institute. Mastewal Birhanu, sales manager at Raxio, presented the cruciality of data centres for the banking industry processing and storage and against damage, theft, software failure, and disaster. He indicated that 60pc of downtimes in banking industries unfold due to data centre-related issues whereas the rest fall to power outages. "Data centre usage still remains underutilised in the industry," he said. Laying on 10,000sqm of the IT Park, Raxio has made a 30 million dollar investment to equip with redundant power and cooling equipment with power outage protection of up to two days with seven layers of security. Representatives from the financial institutions expressed their interest in the offers. Wesen Alemye, chief information officer of the Tsehay Bank, disclosed constant power outages are one of the main problems faced by the current data centre. "We could be looking to work with them," he told Fortune. State-owned bankers have also made an appearance. According to Amare Assefa, chief information officer at the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, the bank could be looking out for data centres where it can store over-flown data that are not mission-critical. "We are merely eyeing the opportunity in the market," he said.