CHRIS HIPP, FOUNDER of RLX Technologies, wheeled a small suitcase into a conference room and tossed it on the table. Instead of pulling out standard travel gear, Hipp unzipped the suitcase and removed his company's prized creation: a 5.25-inch-thick chassis called RLX System 324 that holds 24 server blades.

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While it normally takes a rack more than two feet high to hold that many servers, Woodlands, Texas-based RLX has found a way to cram 24 processors, hundreds of gigabytes of memory, and Ethernet connections galore into something a user could fit into carry-on luggage.

Blade servers arose as the hardware world's topic du jour after Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard last week became the first major vendor to release a blade server designed in-house. Rivals such as Compaq Computer, of Houston, and Sun Microsystems, of Mountain View, Calif., quickly followed with news of their own, and Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM, along with Dell Computer, of Round Rock, Texas, provided updates to their blade plans. Each vendor, however, has such different strategies that it could provide some confusion for users as to the type of blade they should pick.

Blades are trimmed-down, no-nonsense servers that are essentially bare motherboards. They can be packed tightly together in a chassis that uses a common backplane to cut down on the number of cables a user has to deal with. Users will be able to fit hundreds of these servers in a standard rack, and those will consume less power per square foot and take up far less space than traditional servers, according to analysts.

A 1U server unit is 1.75 inches high, and current racks are 42U high. Today, vendors can make one-processor and two-processor servers that fit in a 1U space and then stack 42 of these servers in a rack. With blades, users can fit over 250 servers in the same 42U space.

Most companies have turned to stacking their blades vertically instead of the horizontal layout of servers used today. One after another of the thin, exposed motherboards can be placed side by side in rack.

Blades are primarily popping up at the edge of networks for tasks such as serving up Web pages, e-mail, caching, security, and streaming media.

The high-density blades mean customers can condense more of their old servers down into a smaller space. If a company rents floor space in a server farm, it will pay less rent with blade servers, according to analysts. In addition, companies with large numbers of servers will pay less in electricity costs, due to the low power consumption of blades.

"What folks are looking for is a lot of processor cycles per square foot with easy management," said Dwight Gibbs, consultant and former CTO at investment services company The Motley Fool. "And, if that's what you need, RLX is still the choice."

HP decided to make a 13U rack (22.75 inches high) that can hold as many as 16 server blades, 16 storage or I/O blades, 2 networking blades, and one management blade. Although the company offers a wider range of blade products than do most vendors, HP is not focusing on the density of its blade products or how many processors fit in a 1U space.

Each HP server blade costs close to $2,000 with a low-voltage 700MHz Pentium III chip.

RLX, on the other hand, can fit 24 processors in its 3U chassis and 6 processors in its 1U chassis. It charges $1,199 for each blade with a 667MHz Transmeta Crusoe processor. RLX is also expected to start shipping an Intel processor-based product in the early part of 2002, according to sources familiar with RLX's plans.

HP admits that processor density was not the biggest priority with its first attempt at blades. The company has an extensive road map for its blade products, showing improvements in chassis design and other technology that will help the company shrink its servers down. But HP sees flexibility as the biggest advantage of blades.

Some competitors, such as Sun, claim that density is the key advantage of blades and that users will demand at least 5 processors per 1U.

"HP can say they have blades, but they don't," said Steven MacKay, vice president and chief architect of Sun's system products group. "Customers want density in terms of compute power per cubic meter."

So far, Sun has released little news on its blades. The vendor will release a 3U chassis late next year that holds 15 UltraSparc processors and runs management software that is still under development. Each blade will cost about $1,000.

Dell also plans to use a 3U chassis and will launch different flavors of blades, including some targeted at the low-voltage market and some with full-powered Pentiums, said Darrell Ward, senior product manager for modular computing at Dell.

Ward estimates that blade servers can get two or three times the density of current products, such as the PowerEdge 1550, which fits two Intel Pentium III processors into 1U. Dell plans to offer blades in the second half of next year but would not detail pricing, Ward said.

Compaq will ship a 3U chassis in the first quarter that will fit as many as 20 of its low-voltage Pentium III-based QuickBlades. The company will follow that release with a 6U chassis designed to handle higher end applications with two-processor blades based on Pentium IIIs. Compaq is not yet disclosing pricing, said Sally Stevens, marketing director for the company's density-optimized servers.

IBM, which has already entered the blade market by reselling RLX gear, expects to roll out its blade servers in the second half of next year, said Tom Bradicich, director of architecture and technology for IBM's Intel-based server group.

IBM's eXcalibur blades will be designed for density, Bradicich said, with the company trying to squeeze between 100 and 300 Intel processors in a 42U rack, providing between two and seven processors per 1U, he said. The company has not released pricing.

Although RLX appears to be the leader in the blade market with a highly dense product that has been shipping for some time, the company will face increasing competition now that the "big boys" are bringing out products of their own.

"RLX tends to be a very dot-com or service provider-focused product," said Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at Illuminata, in Nashua, N.H. "The density is very good; the cable management is very good. The difference you see with HP, Compaq and IBM blades will be that they scale up to run large applications" such as large databases and transaction processing, he said.

The larger vendors have taken a more conservative approach with their first blade products. RLX's Hipp argued that companies such as HP and Compaq don't want to eat into profits from their other slim server products. HP, however, claimed it can deliver support and services for its blades that are better than what a smaller company can offer.

"The RLX guys have been very focused on density," said Mark Hudson, director of worldwide marketing for HP's Business Systems and Technology Organization. "But let's be honest about it, they can't provide the overall solution, support, and services that HP or any other major vendor can."

Still, RLX has already developed a loyal customer base that finds the density aspects of RLX's products very compelling.

Wu-chun Feng, leader of the RADIANT (Research And Development In Advanced Network Technology) team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is using the dense RLX blades to make a supercomputer that is just a fraction of the size of its predecessors.

"We got into blades because we are running out of space," Feng said. "We did not want to pay for new building just to house a supercomputer. RLX's products let us fit a supercomputer into something about the size of a soccer goal [24 feet wide]." That will be the width of a line of 42U racks that RADIANT will set up side by side.

HP and several other blade companies demonstrated their blades to Feng, but he will continue to use RLX, primarily because of the density factor.

HP contends that just getting a brand-name blade product out early will help HP to familiarize users with this type of server and edge out big rivals.

HP's plan is working to some degree, with one Sun user deciding to purchase one of the HP blade systems because Sun had yet to get a product on the market.

"Right now I am very concerned about Sun's ability to compete in this business," said Huw Morgan, CTO at Bell Globemedia Interactive.

As a large Web site publisher, Bell Globemedia Interactive looks to move aggressively with blades so it can reduce the amount of space consumed by its servers and cut its power costs. Morgan plans to have 50 percent of the company's data center running on HP's blades by the end of next year.

"You have to think HP will improve the density over time," he said.

Still, Hipp argued that his company's large lead in density shows that a smaller, more flexible company had to do the early work in this emerging market that could revolutionize server architectures.

Hipp wheeled his suitcase full of blades out of the office building, knowing his company has a battle ahead of it. But no matter which company emerges as the victor in the blade race, he said he knows users will embrace the emerging technology. Who can resist more power, in a smaller space, for less money?