IBM launched its newest mainframe, the z13, last week in New York City. Built for the mobile economy, the z13 can process 2.5 billion transactions daily. It enables real-time encryption on all mobile transactions at scale, and it includes embedded analytics that provide real-time transactions faster and cheaper than the competition, the company said.

Banks and businesses toiled over the weekend to crush a bug in a widely used open source operating system. The flaw has been in Unix for some 25 years, but it was revealed just last week. If exploited, the vulnerability could be used to inject malicious code or take command of a system or device. Dubbed "Shellshock," it requires patching systems and devices running Apple's OS X, Linux and Unix.

Fires may be easy to start, but putting them out is a different matter. Case in point: the Systemd inferno. What started a few weeks ago as a relatively straightforward controversy over an oft-debated technology Visit the VMware Tech Center has now virtually blown up in Linux fans' faces. The latest flareup? None other than the suggestion that Linux be split in two.

Fedora is perhaps one of the hallmark Linux distributions. It is sponsored by Red Hat, the commercial developer of RHEL. Red Hat's investment in the Fedora community is collaborative. Fedora Linux releases often provide RHEL developers with a field test environment that incubates innovative open source software technologies. Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released in late 1994 as Red Hat Commercial Linux.

IBM's new Flex System compute node solutions -- the x280 X6, x480 X6 and x880 X6 -- don't qualify as anything new, some might say. After all, they utilize solutions announced months ago -- IBM's X6 in mid-January and Intel's Xeon E7v2 a month later -- which means they simply have been upgraded with the respective vendors' latest and greatest technologies.

A fire that erupted at the data center of Samsung SDS in Gwacheon, South Korea, reportedly took out services to Samsung smartphones, tablets and smart TVs for several hours. The company reportedly stopped all services offered through its website and smartphone apps, and said consumers could not use its online payment services or receive text message confirmations of payments made.

Like most small, inbred communities, Silicon Valley encourages and thrives on gossip, even when it's of little substance. In popular-speak, Valley gossip has a "low signal to noise ratio," but the rumor mill is vibrantly alive despite that shortcoming -- partly due to venture capitalists, whose efforts parallel the day-to-day business of technology.

During the heyday of the dot-com boom, then-HP CEO Carly Fiorina espoused "good enough" computing. Despite significant performance differences between x86 servers and Unix and other enterprise-class systems, the dramatically lower cost of x86-based products would cause organizations to rethink their computing priorities and adopt, buy and deploy x86 whenever and wherever possible, she maintained.

The open source business model has an inherent ability to bring software rivals together. This approach to developing and distributing software keeps expanding the usefulness and success of the Linux operating system as well. Linux has not yet come close to replacing Windows on the desktop, but open source is much more than Linux. Its "co-opetitive" nature is spreading through the enterprise.

Linux on the desktop may have missed its adoption time line, but Linux in the cloud is a win-win proposition for the post-PC movement. Microsoft's Azure may be the only real threat to Linux cloud dominance -- all other major cloud software platforms are based on Linux and open source software. Some enterprise Linux distros are showing up as cloud-based offerings.

Lenovo Group's $2.3 billion deal to purchase IBM's low-end, commodity x86 Server portfolios, related resources and operations is an all-around win for everyone involved. The sale of the IBM x86 servers has been rumored for well over a year, as Big Blue grappled with continuing pressure on its low-margin x86 servers. In its most recent quarter, IBM's revenue dropped 5.5 percent to $27.7 billion.

In case you missed last week's announcement that Lenovo would be acquiring IBM's System x x86 server business -- rumors had been making the rounds for months -- here are some of the details: Lenovo is acquiring IBM's x86 server hardware business for $2.3 billion, approximately $2 billion of which will be paid in cash and the balance in Lenovo stock.

Lenovo has struck a deal to acquire IBM's x86 server business. The deal, jointly announced Thursday, covers System x; BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches; x86-based Flex integrated systems; NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and related software; blade networking; and maintenance operations. Lenovo is paying around $2.3 billion for the business.

Mentioning virtualization technology to typical computer users in a work environment will get you a puzzled look. Despite the apparent obscurity of this IT trend, virtualization is making an increasingly large impact on SMBs. Some type of virtualization was reported in place by 77 percent of firms with 500 or fewer employees who responded to a recent survey.

The popularity of cloud storage is growing rapidly, and few would deny that open source technology is driving individual and business users to the clouds in droves. Yet enterprise adoption decisions are often hindered by competing technologies for public and private clouds. Often, it is less a question of open or closed source and more an issue of service and cost.

IBM's recent Enterprise 2013 conference in Orlando, Fla., was the Systems and Technology Group's inaugural event focusing on high-end business solutions. So it was no surprise that the CIOs, partners and IT practitioners -- data center admins and managers -- who work with IBM's System z mainframe and Power Systems platforms were thick on the ground.

Discuss the merits of the many competing desktop Linux distributions out there, and you could fill several hours with heated debate. Turn the conversation to enterprise server distros, however, and the room can become quiet very quickly. The fact is, those on the hunt for the best or easiest or cheapest enterprise Linux distro have far fewer choices.

Russia's Pirate Party wrote a letter to NASA offering to host the agency's website, which is currently out of commission because of the government shutdown. The Pirate Party -- a minority political movement in many European countries predicated on privacy and transparency -- informed NASA that it could use the party's dedicated servers until the U.S. government got off the ground.

Chinese websites with the ".cn" domain name extension fell on Sunday to a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, the state-run China Internet Network Information Center reported. Two attacks reportedly were launched -- the first at midnight on Sunday and the second at 4 p.m. CINIC described the second attack as the largest DDoS attack it has faced so far.

Amazon Web Services were impacted in some areas on Sunday, six days after Web stores in the U.S. and Canada went down for about 30 minutes, causing losses estimated at up to $45 million. The latest outage lasted about an hour and impacted Facebook's Instagram, Twitter's Vine and Airbnb, among others. Amazon blamed the problem on a networking device that caused packet losses, which it replaced.

Server-side Linux has been pushing into the enterprise for some years now, and 42 percent of respondents to a survey conducted on behalf of Linux vendor SUSE said it was either their primary server OS or one of their top server platforms. Perhaps more importantly, Linux is extending its reach beyond its traditional areas of supercomputing, Web servers, Internet hosting and application development.

The FCC is looking into a complaint that Google Fiber's ban on hosting computer servers on its network violates its Open Internet Order and Rules. Google Fiber told the FCC, among other things, that its policy was fully consistent with the Order and Rules, but critics contend the company has done an about-face on its previously vociferous support for Net neutrality.

On its face, EMC's recently acquisition of ScaleIO seems pretty straightforward. The company said the deal will further strengthen its Flash portfolio by combining ScaleIO's highly scalable server software with PCIe Flash card solutions, like EMC XtremSF. ScaleIO will operate within the EMC Flash Product Division, becoming an integral part of the XtremSW Suite.

Over the past three-plus decades, it is hard to think of a business computing-related technology that's driven more fundamental value than virtualization, and it's for a very simple reason: Since hardware evolves at a far faster pace than software, systems tend to deliver far more performance than needed, meaning they are drastically underutilized.

There's no shortage of partner initiatives at most annual IT vendor events, but that was especially apparent at SAP's recent Sapphire NOW conference in Orlando, Fla. In large part, it's simply the nature of the event beast. Vendors work for weeks or even months on conference-related announcements, hoping to garner the attention of energized, enthusiastic attendees.

It's a well-known fact that statistics can be manipulated to suit virtually every occasion and purpose, but every once in a while an example comes along that illustrates that rule with breathtaking clarity. Case in point? Two recent surveys on the topic of FOSS that came out in the very same week.

New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed. The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. To do this, IT operations teams must understand the three laws of service-oriented IT operations management.

HP on Monday announced the availability of a new platform of microservers in its Project Moonshot program as it tries to carve out a new energy efficient, lower-cost niche in the server market. The company says the new servers are designed to help companies and organizations deal with the challenges of current computing trends such as cloud computing, Big Data, and mobile and social usage.

Oracle launched new midrange and high-end Sparc T5 and M5 servers this week with claims that the T5 models have set 17 world records and performed better than IBM's Power 780 series. That set off a round of dueling statements between the companies. "Most Oracle benchmark claims are not audited or published, although they do have some industry benchmarks, including TPC-C," said IBM spokesperson Jeff Cross.

Since it was announced months before its official release that SimCity would require an online connection to play, fans of the urban planning game have voiced their frustration. Their angst only intensified after this month's launch, which was plagued by crashes and server connection issues. However, a game modder has just released a demo that suggests the game can be played in an offline setting.