The Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) procured a X3950 server with 32 Gigabytes of RAM memory at a cost of 3.1 million Br. The server will be the largest in Ethiopia.

The corporation bought the server from MTKY Information Technology Service.

According to Seyoum Abera, director of EEPCo’s Information Computer Technology (ICT) Department, the server is needed to accommodate an increase in the number of customers that EEPCo serves.

“Such a server has never existed in Ethiopia,” said Yonas Bekele, an expert in the sector who works for Computer Professionals Plc. 

The lifespan of this server running at full capacity ranges from five to ten years, depending on the quality of maintenance that the server gets, Seyoum asserted. The server has a Central Processing Unit (CPU) with 16 dual coil processors.

When EEPCo issued a tender for the procurement of the X3950 server on July 5, 2007, only four companies were invited to participate. MKTY and Afcor Plc were among the four competitors.

According to Seyoum, MKTY was selected because the company offered the lowest price and had a good track record. Afcor’s offer was the highest. MKTY’s IBM-based server also appeared better in quality than the servers offered by the rival bidding companies according to evaluations made by the evaluating committee.

Markos Tilahun, sales manager of MKTY Information Technology Service, told Fortune that the product was imported from the Netherlands.

MKTY Plc, a multinational company dealing in high-tech products and machineries, was established in 1994. This multinational has been supplying technological materials for such countries as Sudan and Djibouti. 

Servers as large as the 32GB memory capacity that the corporation now possesses  can yield distinct efficiency in terms of feeding greater accession to many more computer users at the corporation in the process of data processing, an Information Technology expert said.

This is because an IBM-based server has the capacity to protect the safety of software installed in the data processing system, this expert pointed out. Moreover, the server can save EEPCo from spending resources on buying accessories and maintaining a server with lesser memory capacity like the one it had been using previously. The new server has three times more capacity than the previous server (10GB) the corporation had.