June 2001
First commercial blade servers ship
RLX Technologies began shipping the first commercial blade servers in June 2001 — ultra-dense x86Intel's dominant CPU architecture family — the instruction set behind most PCs and servers for decades. servers in a shared chassis.
What it was for
Blade servers swapped standalone 1U boxes for interchangeable cards sharing power, cooling, and networking in a chassis — HP, IBMInternational Business Machines — a major computer and enterprise technology company since the early 20th century., and Dell followed with c-Class, BladeCenter, and PowerEdge blades. Datacenters packed more compute per rack for virtualization hosts and web tiers. Backend developers deploying on "blades" in the 2000s ran on this form factor.
Why it's here
RLX blade servers pioneered the dense datacenter form factor that dominated 2000s enterprise hosting.
Why it mattered
Blades made horizontal scaling cheaper and standardized rack infrastructure for virtualization.
What it solved
Traditional rack servers wasted space, power, and cabling in growing datacenters.
Media
ImageBlade serverDmitry Nosachev, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Related
- Compaq ProLiant servers launched1993
- AMD Opteron — first x86-64 CPU — launchedApril 22, 2003
- VMware 1.0 releasedMay 15, 1999
- Sun Enterprise 10000 released1996