(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Blade server innovator Christopher Hipp, who founded both Blade Systems Alliance and RLX Technologies, died last week in a cycling accident in Menlo Park, California.
The 49-year-old Hipp, who was also a professional ranked competitive cyclist, collapsed while riding his bike on Sand Hill Road, said local police.
Blade System Alliance, a company which Hipp was a technology chair and an adviser at the time of his passing, posted this note on its website:
“Today we lost a good friend and the true founder of the Blade Server Industry, Chris Hipp. Chris has always been an innovator and profound technologist, providing direction and insight to the industry and especially this association. Chris passed away after suffering a heart attack. He will be sorely missed.”
Among his many accomplishments, Hipp pantented the concept of using ultra-dense blade servers in data centers to reduce power consumption.
In the late 1990s, Hipp was known for his outspoken editorials on his website, where he vented about the state of data centers and how IT administrators had to deal with the numerous problems that came along with deploying large numbers of 1.75-inch “pizza box” rack servers.
To resolve this issue, he came up with a revoluntionary idea to use clusters of small energy-efficient processors, or blades.
In 2001, his idea for blade servers debuted in the market when RLX first began offering low-powered blade servers.
The blade servers stored 336 processors into a standard 73.5-inch rack, powered by Transmeta’s Crusoe chips.
And though RLX was bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2005 and Transmeta went out of business last year, their concept have been adopted by larger companies, helping to significantly shape data center technology today.
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