Green Grid, the consortium of IT companies and professionals focusing on improving energy efficiency in data centers, on Thursday unveiled two new free online tools for assessing how efficiently a mission-critical facility uses energy.

The tools are the Power Efficiency Calculator and the PUE Calculator. The former can be used to compare various data center designs and configurations in terms of energy efficiency and the latter determines a particular facility's Power Usage Effectiveness, the metric Green Grid created in 2007, which has since enjoyed widespread adoption by the data center industry.

The Power Efficiency Calculator uses input data like workload, availability and space to evaluate a facility's energy use and create a report.

The Grid will make both tools available by the end of the first quarter of 2010. The new calculators add to the organization's existing tool for identifying free-cooling opportunities in various geographical locations in the US, Canada and Europe, launched in 2009.

Also on Thursday, Green Grid announced a new whitepaper which identifies opportunities for data center infrastructure optimization after its IT infrastructure has been virtualized. The announcements were made during the organization's annual technical forum in San Jose, Calif.

"There's opportunity in optimizing the power and cooling infrastructure to take advantage of the reduced load," explained Kathrin Winkler, a Green Grid board member and VP of Corporate Sustainability at EMC. After a virtualization project, "if you don't clean up the power and cooling in the data center, your consumption goes down but it doesn't go down as much as it should be."

The new whitepaper's title is Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Physical Infrastructure.

At its Silicon Valley conference, the Green Grid also unveiled a new book it has published jointly with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), titled Real Time Energy Consumption Measurements in Data Centers, and a new partnership with Data Center Pulse, also an industry organization.