IBM announced on Thursday that it has beat out Dell for a lucrative infrastructure deal with Avalon, a leading hosting provider that manages more than 16,000 websites across Europe. Established in 1997, the Croatian firm offers monitoring, online collaboration, email and other services to organizations in a wide range of segments from healthcare to telecommunications.

In an initiative to consolidate its infrastructure and accommodate future growth, Avalon implemented a hybrid cloud architecture using IBM System x3550 and x3650 servers. The company also upgraded its network environment to support over 1,000 fiber optic connections across three geographically separated routes.

“The IBM solution was the best one to fit our needs,” said Damir Mujic, the chief executive officer of Avalon. “IBM’s System x server platform together with IBM networking provides a reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructure that scales as we grow and can handle diverse workloads. In addition, with IBM we avoid integration issues arising if we have to deal with different companies delivering different parts of an overall solution.”

A week ago, IBM published a case study detailing how Inland Northwest Health Services utilizes its storage virtualization platform to increase the performance and reliability of its service solutions. Deploying SVC with IBM System x servers and Storwize and DS8000 storage systems enabled the IT vendor to reduce its data center footprint by 28 percent while doubling performance for end-users.

In September, Big Blue announced that it will inject $1 billion into the Linux ecosystem over the next five years to boost its Power Systems line. As part of the investment, the company will open a developer center in Montpellier, France and a launch a free PaaS service for the technical community.