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Blade server inventor dies

by on21 July 2009

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Power consumption drops

Christopher Hipp, the IT pioneer who developed low-power-consuming blade servers, has died while cycling.

Hipp, founded RLX Technologies and the Blade Systems Alliance. He was a professionally ranked super fit competitive cyclist. Hipp patented the concept of utilizing ultra-dense blade servers and their ability to trim power consumption.

The idea was born out of the sorry state of power waste in data centers in the late 1990s. He thought that if you used clusters of small energy-efficient processors called blades the problem would be reduced. Hipp wrote on his Web site.

"The deployment and management of these servers was becoming a headache of catastrophic proportion. What had happened was that while tier-one vendors were busy one-upping each other by cramming hotter CPUs into smaller and smaller sheet metal boxes, they completely forgot about efficiency!"

Blade servers started to appear in 2001 when RLX began marketing its low-powered blade servers by placing 336 processors into a standard 73.5-inch rack. They were powered by Transmeta's Crusoe chips. Unfortunately RLX and Transmeta eventually failed to gain traction in the industry and both companies have dropped out of sight.

But the concept was picked up by bigger companies with more money to invest and Blade Servers became part of the IT landscape. Hipp worked at the Blade System Alliance and with start-up companies in Silicon Valley.
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