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.