Blade PC - History and Vendors

History and Vendors

ClearCube, a small privately held company based in Austin, Texas, gets credit for creating and popularizing the category. Started in the late 1990s, they have been very aggressive promoting the concept especially in the United States and in vertical markets such as financial traders, hospitals and national defense organizations.

HP was second to the category with the 2004 announcement of their “Consolidated Client Infrastructure” in North America. In contrast to ClearCube, HP emphasized density while minimizing power consumption, which resulted in the ability to put far more blade PCs in an industry standard 42U rack (up to 280). HP’s first offering, however, was a Transmeta-based solution, which offered only a marginal end user experience. HP has since migrated to AMD-based blade PCs. Like the other blade PC vendors, HP offers MS RDP with their solutions, and they have announced availability of another protocol called Remote Graphic Software that has some advantages over MS RDP, especially in regard to delivery of three-dimensional and streaming content.

Hitachi offers a blade PC of their own in Japan. It is reportedly only available in Japan. There does not seem to have been any enhancements since it was first introduced in 2005. Though more like the CCI solution than the ClearCube solution, it is less dense and has all cabling out of the front of the unit.