This week, HP decided to buy RLX, one of the pioneers of blade servers. RLX had actually been out of the blade hardware business for awhile — now they make blade management software. Nevertheless, this move is the symbolic final stroke of blade servers going mainstream. I remember how cool blade servers were when they first came out and RLX blades were the first ones that really offered a viable business solution. It was just cool as heck to be able to fit 10 servers in the space that had previously only fit two similarly-powered servers. All in all, I think blades are still underutilized in most IT shops, even though HP, IBM, and Dell all have extensive lines of blades now.