Becky Elliott is a Senior Systems Administrator and a member […]

The Gestalt IT Rundown discusses the IT news of the week, each and every Wednesday. This week, Ken Nalbone and Tom Hollingsworth will further discuss the fallout of the IBM – Red Hat acquisition, Microsoft’s GitHub, enterprise drone, Xilinx on Azure, and more!

Apple released a new Mac Mini, the first refresh since 2014. But they didn’t just pack in newer chips. By adding a slew of Thunderbolt 3 ports, the Mac Mini offers something new: Modularity.

You’ve got to hand it to Bloomberg. You’d think they might back off of anonymously-sourced stories involving server chips. But no, the publication is diving right in with a new report on the FPGA’s used on Microsoft’s Azure servers. 

Big news broke over the weekend: IBM is buying Red Hat for $34 billion. What will this mean for the open-source stalwart and the larger hybrid cloud market? Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth, Ken Nalbone, and Richard Stroffolino discuss.

HipChat and Stride were already victims to the Atlassian chopping block. Now the company has announced the sale of their Jitsi videoconferencing tool to 8×8. The result is a leaner and more focused company.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri sees edge computing and intelligence as the keys to the company’s growth going forward.

Red Hat and Nvidia are officially partnering to bring better GPU training for AI applications on OpenShift.

In this excellent Network Collective Short Take, Russ White breaks down the logic behind complex passwords. While a certain degree of complexity is needed to ward off the lowest level attackers, the real goal here is to make the barrier to guessing passwords enough for the would-be attacker to seek another target. 

Microsoft finalized their acquisition of GitHub today, paying a cool $7.5 billion in cash for the ubiquitous Git repository. It seems like the European Commission approval was the last step to get this deal done. We’ll see how the platform fares under Microsoft stewardship.