Huawei's Xinghe Intelligent Ultra-Resilient Data Center Network Empowers Ethiopia's Top Bank COOP with Always-on Services

Facing rapid business growth and increasingly diverse customer demands, financial institutions in Ethiopia urgently need resilient and intelligent digital infrastructure to manage rising workloads and security challenges. As the nerve center of banking operations, a data center's reliability and intelligence directly determine service quality—making resilient data center network architecture a cornerstone of financial digitalization.

Cooperative Bank of Oromia (COOP), one of Ethiopia's five largest private banks, serves over 15 million customers through over 700 branches and thousands of ATMs, while partnering with numerous international financial institutions. In response to expanding business scale and digital intelligent transformation goals, its legacy single data center architecture struggles to ensure reliable operations, while low O&M efficiency hampers innovation. To address these challenges, COOP has joined forces with Huawei to build an intelligent, highly resilient, and easy-to-maintain data center network to support its ongoing innovation and growth.

Africa's Fintech Acceleration Demands Resilient Networks

As COOP's customer base and operational complexity grow, its legacy network architecture reveals several disconnects:

• Single-point architecture risks service continuity

The bank's reliance on a single data center creates vulnerability—any failure risks interrupting critical transactions. Aging hardware also limits scalability, prompting an urgent need for active-active architecture.

• Manual O&M limits speed and accuracy

Traditional network changes rely on manual expertise, resulting in frequent errors and long delays—often days per adjustment—harming agility. Automated tools are essential to improve O&M efficiency and precision.

• Integration challenges between new and legacy systems

The new data center must communicate with legacy systems, but cross-vendor protocol differences cause data sync delays, threatening the bank's goal of active-active operations. An open, compatible solution is critical for smooth integration.

Xinghe Intelligent Ultra-Resilient Data Center Network: Reinforcing COOP's Digital Foundation

Huawei's Xinghe Intelligent Ultra-Resilient Data Center Network—built on the CloudEngine switch series and iMaster NCE management platform—leverages AI to deliver steady deployment, stable reliability, and smart O&M. This full-scenario upgrade equips COOP's financial network with uncompromising reliability.

• Steady deployment: zero provisioning error via network-security collaborative simulation

The deeply integrated CloudEngine switches and iMaster NCE create an active-active cross-DC architecture, enabling seamless migration between new and legacy data centers. Standardized modeling and simulation & verification ensure 100% configuration accuracy. Key to this deployment is network-security collaborative simulation technology, which proactively identifies and resolves potential issues by replicating real-world scenarios—ensuring zero-error service launch. This approach not only boosts deployment efficiency but also reduces operational risks, supporting critical services with second-level failover capabilities.

• Stable reliability: millisecond-level switchover with zero downtime

Huawei's exclusive iReliable technology employs a triple-layered protection mechanism—device-level M-LAG, link-level Data Plane Fast Recovery (DPFR), and network-level Data Plane Crossing Faults (DPCF)—to guarantee rapid response and recovery from faults. Switchovers happen in milliseconds, ensuring a truly disruption-free experience.

• Smart O&M: five-dimensional digital map

Huawei's network digital map provides full visibility across applications, networks, devices, links, and traffic. COOP's O&M team can pinpoint faults instantly and take corrective action efficiently. With AI-driven full-flow analysis, potential risks are predicted 48 hours in advance, shifting O&M from reactive to proactive.

Navigating Toward Smart Finance with the Help of Huawei's Xinghe Network Solution

Huawei's collaboration with COOP not only solves existing data center network challenges but also sets a new benchmark for digital intelligent transformation in the financial industry. The Huawei Xinghe Intelligent Ultra-Resilient Data Center Network Solution strengthens deployment, reliability, and O&M—creating a robust backbone for continued innovation.

Looking ahead, the evolving fintech landscape will bring even more complex challenges for data center networks. Huawei remains committed to deepening its partnership with COOP under the banner of continuous innovation, exploring AI-finance integration, and injecting intelligent momentum into Ethiopia's economy. Through resilient architecture, Huawei aims to build a "digital bridge" connecting Africa's financial ecosystem to global markets—contributing to a prosperous future for the global financial industry.