To combat the impending dearth of skilled data scientists and analysts the University of Rochester, New York has set up the Institute for Data Science (IDS). The New York State recently provided support to create a new Rochester Center of Excellence in Data Science (CoE) at the University which, will cooperate with the IDS to leverage basic research, training and technology development in this field of Big Data to drive regional economic development.

To supervise the workings of the IDS an External Advisory Committee for the University of Rochester’s Institute for Data Science convened earlier this month in Rochester for its first meeting.

Conceptual image via rochester.edu

The committee that consists of 10 members from leading high-technology companies, industry and academia, held discussions and attended a series of presentations updating them on the Institute’s research and education goals and plans. Members include Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research, Oren Etzioni, the executive director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Alon Halevy, the structured data management research group lead at Google, among others.

“The External Advisory Committee connects us to the world’s leading industrial research and development laboratories in computer science, medicine, and communications, as well as other top universities doing work in data science,” said Henry Kautz, director of the Institute.

“We look forward to the insights they will offer, which will help us ensure the Institute and Rochester become a reference point for data science worldwide.”

The University’s Institute for Data Science brings together interdisciplinary research in this field while offering bachelor’s and masters’ programs in data science and related subjects.

The Center for Governmental Research had published a report last year that pointed out that IDS will create 460 jobs and generate an estimated $530 million in research funding over a 10-year period, reports the University.

Photo credit: RLHyde / Foter / CC BY-SA

Earlier this year, IBM’s SoftLayer division announced that it would spend over $1.2 billion to expand its global cloud footprint, with plans to deliver cloud services from 40 data centres worldwide in 15 countries and five continents by the end of the year. The development of this project will see data centres open in China, Washington D.C., Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, Mexico City, India, and Dallas.

Among the latest openings, V3 reported earlier today that London is set to open its datacentre in July. The new facility will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking.

“London has the headquarters of about a third of the biggest companies around the world, so it is obviously very fertile ground for many enterprise businesses, but this is part of our overall $1.2bn expansion, so we’re not just building out here in London, it’s around the globe.”

The global cloud market is set to grow to $200 billion by 2020, according to some estimates, and IBM look to be establishing themselves as key providers of cloud services early on. According to Doug Clark, IBM’s Cloud Leader for UK and Ireland, enterprises moving to the cloud are seeing incredible advantages over their competitors.

“The enterprises that are really getting cloud computing, the ones that are leading the pace, they are seeing twice the revenue performance compared to the rest of the pack, so they are disappearing off into the sunset. They’re getting a competitive advantage and they are reducing TCO from it,” he said.

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Over the weekend, IBM opened their new SoftLayer data centre in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong centre is the first of 15 new centres to be unveiled, as part of IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its cloud services on a global scale.

“Our expansion into Hong Kong gives us a stronger Asian market presence as well as added proximity and access to our growing customer base in region,” Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer said. “This new data center gives the fast-growing, entrepreneurial businesses that Hong Kong is known for a local facility to tap into SoftLayer’s complete portfolio of cloud services.”

Softlayer’s cloud infrastructure, incorporating hardware, virtual servers, storage and networking allows users to be architects of their own cloud optimal cloud environments. End users in the Hong Kong region now have access to SoftLayer services with less than 40 milliseconds of latency. The data centre itself has capacity for over 15,000 physical servers and connectivity provided by Tier 1 carriers such as NTT, Tata and Equinix.

Hong Kong is becoming an increasingly popular destination for data centres; last month, we reported that Alibaba opened their fourth data centre here. But establishing big data infrastructure in this regional market is not without its obstacles; the SoftLayer centre opening was delayed by a month, due to delayed approval from the Chinese government. Parent company IBM are also facing struggles in China, as the government investigates whether Chinese banks’ reliance on IBM servers compromises national financial security.

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(Photo credit: Bob Mical)

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Microsoft announced last week that it would be expanding its data center operations in Wyoming. The tech giant will invest another $274 million in the data center, bringing the total investment in the area to almost $500 million.

“Microsoft is excited to expand its datacenter operations in Cheyenne. This will ensure the best possible delivery of cloud infrastructure and services to our current and future customers in Wyoming and the surrounding region,”

It is believed that Microsoft will begin the expansion of the data center in late spring 2014. The data center opened late 2013.The news of Microsoft’s investment in Cheyenne comes just two weeks after the company’s plans to expand their data center operations in Iowa.

Investment in data centers has been a trend among tech giants recently; Google, Facebook, IBM and Amazon are all looking for space to build new infrastructure. With cloud computing on the rise, we should expect to see an increase in data center investment in the near future.

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Have you ever wondered where all your data is being stored? Where does the information from your computer go? Here’s a simple, yet informative, infographic explaining the process and workings of data-centres in the U.S.

(Image credit: Mervyn Chua)