RLX Technologies

~ the last words ~

Three hundred and twenty four servers in one rack was the number RLX Technologies put on its first product, and in 2001 nobody else had anything close to sell. The machine was called System 324. Each blade was a stripped computer on a card that slid into a shared chassis and drew its power and its network through the backplane instead of out the back of its own box, which is the arrangement every large server vendor was selling within three years. The company was two years old.

It started in 1999 as RocketLogix, in Dallas, around Christopher Hipp, one of the people credited with inventing the blade server. The money came through Cracken, Harkey & Co., a local investment firm Hipp talked into building an investment profile for a more efficient kind of web server. The rest of the origin story is Compaq. Rod Canion, who founded Compaq, helped raise the round, and two more Compaq alumni, Gary Stimac and Michael Swavely, took over as chief executive and president after the 2001 rename and the move to The Woodlands, Texas.

The first blades ran Transmeta Crusoe processors, designed for notebooks and handhelds and never before put into a server. That was the whole trick. A chip that sipped power let you stand far more of them in one cabinet without cooking the room. It was also the weak point: Transmeta had quality problems bad enough that it suspended shipments, and in February 2002 RLX shipped the ServerBlade 800i on an Intel Pentium III instead. By then HP and IBM were in the market. Dell arrived in 2004.

In 2001 I was two years off starting university in Ankara, on a connection still measured in kilobits, and a rack of servers was something I had only seen in a photograph. Blades reached me much later and from the other side, as the ordinary furniture of a data center I would eventually ssh into, with no manufacturer's name on them at all. That is the odd fate of a company that wins an argument about shape: the shape survives and stops being attributable to anyone.

~ the record ~

~ the density pitch ~

The pitch was arithmetic and the product was named after the answer. A standard rack is 42 units high, and in 2001 an ordinary 1U server filled one of those units with a motherboard, a power supply, its own drives and its own cables. RLX moved the power supply and the network switching into the chassis so everything in a slot could share them, which left a card thin enough to stand a great many of them side by side. The claim on the box was up to 324 blades in one standard 42-unit rack, and that is where the product name came from.

Density was not an abstract virtue in 2001. Hosting companies were renting space by the rack and paying for the power and the cooling, and a web farm was several hundred nearly identical machines each doing one small thing. The forecasts followed: by the end of 2004 IDC was telling anyone who asked that blades would be a nine billion dollar market in 2008. RLX was selling into that number with about a hundred and fifteen employees.

~ the december memo ~

On 22 December 2004 RLX sent out layoff notices, and the next day it began telling customers it was leaving the blade server business. Doug Erwin, by then the chief executive, said the company would sell Control Tower, its management software, through OEM deals with the large server vendors instead, as a module that could plug into Computer Associates' Unicenter or IBM's Tivoli. He would not say how many jobs went.

The timing is what makes it read strangely. The sixth generation of ServerBlade, the SB6400 on Intel's Xeon with EM64T, had shipped roughly a month earlier. A conference-call company in Wayne, New Jersey running about a hundred of the blades told eWeek it was disappointed but not surprised. Erwin's argument was that a small hardware company has no path to winning on volume against a large one, and that investors who had walked away came back once he told them RLX would be a software company.

~ what the patent was worth ~

Christopher Hipp and David Kirkeby filed on 20 July 2000, and on 25 June 2002 the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted number 6,411,506 for a high density web server chassis system and method. By then everyone was selling the design. HP announced on Monday 3 October 2005 that it would buy RLX for a sum it did not disclose, and said it planned to merge Control Tower into its own hardware resource management software. A Control Tower package built on RLX technology shipped under HP's name in April 2006.

Six years and six generations of hardware, closed out with a patent on a chassis everybody else ended up building.

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