Memset delivers national heat map

Award-winning cloud provider, Memset has today announced they are providing the cloud services running the newly launched Web application, developed by The Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) to support the planning and deployment of local, low-carbon energy projects in England.

The National Heat Map, launched today by the Department of Energy and Climate Change is a publicly accessible resource providing high-resolution maps of heat demand across England. It aims to help local authorities, community groups and other users identify locations where heat distribution projects are most likely to make a difference – by cutting carbon emissions and reducing heating costs.

CSE has not invested in any IT infrastructure to provide access to the National Heat Map, instead delivering the content via Memset’s suite of cloud services.  Only one Memset Miniserver VM® virtual machine is required for the core of the system. The heat layer images are being stored in Memstore™, Memset's cloud storage solution, and being delivered via the high-speed content delivery network (CDN) that comes as part of Memstore™.

The Memset development team reported that today's launch, with a peak of 9 million requests per hour, was an excellent stress-test of the CDN service. The AGILE team wrote, tested and deployed a performance enhancement patch this afternoon, ironing out a minor lag issue CSE were reporting.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: “It”s really exciting to see our technology being used for such a great environmental purpose, especially when CSE is using technology in an environmentally friendly way as well - delivering the content via the cloud means the service itself has a reduced carbon footprint compared to the old-school approach of dedicated hardware.“

CSE’s Head of Research and Analysis, Joshua Thumim said: “The National Heat Map represents a big step forward in the use of the web to provide intelligence and support for the development of local energy projects. It combines a very detailed geographic model of energy use with a range of user-friendly visualisation and reporting tools, providing sophisticated GIS functionality to non-technical users via a standard web-browser. We think it’s the future of energy mapping.”

The National Heat Map can be accessed at tools.decc.gov.uk/nationalheatmap/ and requires Internet Explorer 7 or higher. Firefox, Chrome or Safari are recommended.

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