Datacentre and IT managers could benefit from a new free online tool from green datacentre consortium The Green Grid, which has been designed to help lower costs and improve the energy efficiency of their facilities.

The tool, which has been made available in Europe for the first time, allows datacentre managers to work out how much outside air is available to cool individual facilities.

Users simply input variables such as local energy costs, IT load and facility load to calculate the energy savings for their specific datacentres, as well as savings that could be obtained using water-side economisers, according to The Green Grid.

Green Grid members also gain access to a high-resolution map of the estimated hours of air-side and water-side economisation possible for Europe and many specific countries.

"Datacentres with increasing IT loads require more power to cool them, so finding cooling options that use less power is critical not only for organisations that do not have resources to build new facilities, but for those that want to save money," said Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA technical work group chairman of The Green Grid.

"For much of the year, the air outside datacentres can be cooler than the air inside. This tool that The Green Grid has developed will help determine how much free cooling a specific datacentre can leverage."

The tool is available in 33 countries including the UK.