A £2m cloud innovation center is being built by the University of Newcastle under the city’s Go Digital Newcastle project.

The project, being run by Newcastle City Council, includes the rolling out of superfast broadband that will be available to 97% of homes and businesses in UK city of Newcastle.

The council has received a £1m central government grant under its super-connected cities project and the other £1m from the university itself for the cloud center, that will also offer colo services.

Go Digital Newcastle’s project manager Lisa Clark said the university has a lot of expertise and partners within the Cloud environment but there wasn't a facility or network in place to learn or use the skills, which drove the initial idea for the Cloud Innovation Center.

The center will have a decision and virtualization theatre, a learning lab and host a private cloud for testing within a secure environment.

The private cloud will entail 32 CH1211 blade servers and 400TB of raw disc space over two cabinets.

Red Hat enterprises is one of the first companies to confirm a colocation agreement within the Cloud Innovation Center.

The university will also be working from the center alongside partnerships with the likes of Microsoft.

The learning lab is for businesses and academics to learn about the Cloud and to start looking into big data and how businesses can use the cloud safely and securely.

Clark said the initiative was aiming for the gap in the market.

“You can purchase cloud services anywhere, we’re not running in competition with the likes of companies Microsoft or Amazon. We see a gap in the market in Newcastle to provide knowledge of the cloud within the region,” Clark said.

The center is set to open towards the end of 2014.