Violin Memory, Inc., a leading provider of flash storage arrays and appliances delivering application, virtual, and cloud solutions for the enterprise, today announced that the company was recognized with the Cool Tool EdTech Digest Award for Virtualization Solutions. Violin enabled the consolidation and acceleration of the storage solutions supporting Collier County Public Schools, while, improving greatly the performance of the school district’s SQL Server applications and the delivery of education technology services and user experience for 45,000 students and 7,000 employees.

Violin flash storage arrays enabled the consolidation of Collier County Public School’s storage from multiple racks of traditional disk storage subsystems to less than a single rack. The consolidation yielded significant floor space savings, dramatic reduction in power and cooling costs, and streamlined administration for the IT Department. Using the Violin solution, Collier sustained random read and write transactions for its petabyte of data, including a massive Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse that supports online testing for its 45,000 students. The high performance of the Violin array eliminated the need to overprovision server hardware and software licenses, saving the district’s IT Department approximately $200,000 in hardware capital expenditures alone, through the purchasing of smaller servers and the consolidation of SQL Server instances.

“Violin solutions continue to deliver critical business value across industries in finance, education, healthcare, retail, and several other markets,” said Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer at Violin Memory. “Collier County Public Schools is just one example of how our technology brings real benefits to an organization by improving IT and cloud infrastructures. The EdTech Digest Award is a great validation for Violin and the Collier County Public Schools’ IT department.”

According to Victor Rivero, editor in chief of EdTech Digest, “For so many reasons, the education technology space is moving forward with great momentum and a robust spirit. We are shining a spotlight on some of the best and brightest tools, leaders and trendsetters pushing forward today’s education revolution for the benefit of future generations.”