Blade Pioneer and RLX Founder Chris Hipp Dead at 49 - Influencing the Industry (
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However, both RLX and Transmeta began to influence the industry. Server OEMs
eventually began adopting bladed form factors, and established chip makers
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices soon were producing their own low-power chips.
Less than a decade later, both companies are gone—RLX was bought by
Hewlett-Packard in 2005, particularly for its Control
Tower management software, and Transmeta went
out of business last year—but their influence can be seen throughout the
industry. Essentially every systems OEM offers blade servers, and HP officials
are aggressively expanding the blade form factor throughout the company's product
portfolio.
RLX had eventually adopted Intel processors for its blades, but in 2004 the
company had dropped its hardware business to focus on its software offerings,
in particular its Blade Tower
management solution. Hipp had left RLX before HP bought the company.
Hall, who said he and Hipp had worked closely together at the Blade System
Alliance since August 2006, said Hipp had continued his interest in startup
technologies after leaving RLX.
He worked with a number of companies that were trying to get started through
a business incubator in the San Jose, Calif.,
area, Hall said.
“He had a huge reputation as a go-to guy for these companies trying to come
out of the incubator,” Hall said.
He also was working with others in the alliance to improve blade technology.
Hall said he and Hipp were close to publishing a whitepaper on the use of SSDs
(solid-state drives) in blade servers. Blades use traditional disks, which take
up a lot of room, Hall said.
Solid-state technologies were seen as expensive and unreliable, but had
improved in recent years, to the point where Hipp and others saw the benefit of
using them in blade servers.
Some OEMs have been pushing the use of SSDs in their systems. Sun
Microsystems officials last year said they were going to put SSDs throughout
their hardware line.
Hall said Hipp was a natural inventor who wanted to be on the cutting edge.
“He always wanted to be in that accelerated gear, taking technology and
making it better than it always had been,” Hall said.
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