A self-service Web-based TCO calculator was released today which estimates the return on investment of VMware infrastructure including a detailed report on potential cost savings.

The calculator is free of charge and available today at www.vmware.com/go/calculator.

IT decision makers can use the calculator to find ways to address escalating data centre infrastructure and administrative costs from hardware acquisitions, management, power and cooling, real estate and disaster recovery.

Virtualization is designed to allow entire server, storage and network farms to be managed as a shared utility and dynamically allocated to different business units or projects.

Using the VMware TCO calculator, customers now can quickly estimate the potential savings of implementing VMware Infrastructure as a core element of their IT architecture.

International Truck and Engine Corporation technology manager, Barry Naber, said the calculator allows customers to make decisions faster.

"We estimate that VMware infrastructure enables us to avoid $7,500 in hardware and maintenance costs for each server virtualized," Naber said.

"With 230 virtual machines now running our business-critical applications on only 18 physical servers in our data centre, the savings add up to approximately $1.7 million."

The calculator uses a methodology based on VMware customer surveys and experience in the field from working on production deployments.

VMWare's vice president of product and solutions marketing, Raghu Raghuram, said virtualization is an effective initiative companies can undertake to reign in the spiraling costs of maintaining an enterprise data centre.

He said the calculator can help customers to visualize the potential benefits of virtualization and assists them in creating a roadmap for getting started.

A 2006 VMware survey of more than 1,800 customers found virtualization technology can reduce hardware acquisition and energy costs by at least 30 percent, improved staff productivity by more than 30 percent and decreased server provisioning times by at least 40 percent.