Damir Mujic, founder and CEO at AVALON web hosting

As a company that has been in the hosting business for the past 17 years, Avalon has always had only one goal – to provide the best possible service to our customers. We are a premium web hosting provider and we are one of the largest providers in Croatia and the region, hosting more than 16,000 domains across Europe.

Two years ago, we decided to build our web hosting platform entirely from scratch, using the best cloud technology that we could find. While searching for partners, it was extremely important for us to find the best among them and apply the best of their technologies enabling us to provide a premium level service to our customers..

We selected the IBM as a hardware vendor and became the IBM Managed Solutions Provider, building a complete infrastructure on the IBM System x technology. As almost 80% of our customers are using Linux hosting our perfect match was combination of CentOS Linux and KVM hypervisor.

When considering cloud management solutions, we tried many well-known open source and some commercial cloud solutions, and after thorough testing we decided to choose OpenNebula as our foundation platform for future development of our cloud hosting services.

We developed our OpenNebula cloud integration with Ceph, a distributed object store and file system which we found really impressive.  – Today, that is the platform for our shared hosting and virtual server users, and we have over 6 month experience in production.

We believe that OpenNebula with EC2 API support together with Ceph Storage, which is compatible with the S3 object storage, is a very good basis for the further development of our web hosting services, as well as many other services in the future based cloud technology.

Next week in Zagreb, Croatia, on July 3rd at 10 AM, we are organising a press conference where the official launch of our hybrid cloud platform will be announced. I am very grateful to OpenNebula founders Mr. Ignacio M. Llorente and Mr. Rubén S. Montero, who are supporting us in this project, and we are extremely pleased that Mr. Constantion Vasquez, as a Senior Infrastructure Architect at C12G Labs, will attend as a speaker at the conference, introducing OpenNebula project to the Croatian media.

In addition to Mr. Vázquez and myself, other conference speakers will include Mr. Damir Zec, managing director of IBM Croatia, Mr. Dobrisa Adamec, Microsoft MVP and Mr. Tomislav Bronzin, Microsoft MVP who will cover the second smaller part of our platform targeted at  ASP.NET developers.