RLX Technologies (bought by HP in 2005) was a company based in The Woodlands, TX and was the first company in the world to create and market what is now known as a blade server. Founded in 1999 by Christopher Hipp, one of the inventors of the blade server, and numerous former Compaq Computers employees, the company pioneered the use of blade servers, a compact, stripped-down computer server that includes all of the necessary components to operate as a computer while taking up minimal space on a standard rack mount and minimizing power consumption.