Collier County Public Schools Improves Education Technology Services

Violin Memory, Inc. has been selected by Collier County Public Schools, one of
the largest and most technologically advanced K-12 school districts in the US,
to improve the delivery of education technology services for its 45,000
students and 7,000 employees.

Violin’s flash memory arrays accelerate the school district’s SQL Server
applications, increase IT efficiency, and reduce costs while improving the
end-user experience for students and faculty.

Staying ahead of the education
technology curve
Collier County Public Schools operates an IT
infrastructure that holds more than one petabyte of data, including a massive SQL
server data warehouse that supports online testing for its 45,000 students.
After implementing quarterly assessment tests for every student one year ago,
the district began to experience severe I/O latency issues despite using
high-end SAN equipment. The IT department realized its existing
disk-based storage environment could not meet its demanding standards for
performance.

Night and day performance improvements
To solve the growing need for efficient, more cost-effective storage, the
district replaced its traditional disk-based SAN with flash-based storage
arrays from Violin Memory. Almost ommediately, the Collier IT department saw
the Violin solution shape peak loads such as the district’s database
environment, which their former tier 1 storage would not have been able to
support. In addition, the array kept up with sustained
transactions which were random reads and writes.

"As a school district, we have a
small number of people carrying out many different tasks, so we are always
looking at new technologies to be as efficient as possible," said Tom
Petry, director of technology, Collier County Public Schools.

Petry’s IT department evaluated many storage vendors in the market and were
impressed with the large capacity and small footprint of the Violin 6000
and 3000 series arrays and blown away by their performance and ease of
management. The district needed a storage solution that could handle its peak
loads and give it room to grow, and found it.

Efficiency and Lower IT Costs
Violin storage arrays helped Collier County Public Schools condense its
storage from various pools of 50-60 disks to less than a single rack of space,
reducing power and cooling costs while streamlining administration for the IT department. The array’s performance also eliminated the
need to over-provision server hardware and software licenses, enabling the
district’s IT department to achieve approximately $200,000 in hardware savings
alone by purchasing smaller servers and consolidating SQL Server instances.

Narayan Venkat, VP of product management, Violin, said: "Leaders in education technology, like
Collier County Public Schools, are taking huge strides in improving IT and
business efficiency by implementing high performance storage solutions. Using
Violin memory flash array’s the school district is achieving a vision of
providing its students and staff with the best application performance and
reliability."