Blade 1000, 2000, 2500 are all Sparc architecture. 1000 and 2000 differences are mostly cosmetic, 2000 is more attractive, processors and memory are interchangeable, i.e., you can have the same configuration in either. Motherboard is identical. Power supplies (the same) were a problem with the Blade 1000 and 2000, and the box is very heavy. Blade 2500 is a new box, lighter, faster processors (dual 1.6 max), memory is standard ECC DDR , drives are SCSI but DVD drive is ide. A DVDRW is supported. This has been a very solid box with more than sufficient power for the DocuTech/DocuPrint if properly configured. Optimum configuration seems to be dual processor, 4 GB ram.
Original Xerox Blade configuration for the 6135 was one 750 Mhz processor and 1 GB memory, not enough to handle complex variable jobs, and just slow generally. 6180 was beefier. Blade 2000 was not used by Xerox except in unusual circumstances (customer accomodation). Xerox used the Blade 2500 after the 1000 extensively, for both B&W and Color. Here again it was a light box for B&W, one processor and 2 GB of ram.
Xerox ended the Sparc DocuSP at 51 SP2 (and some SPARs)
Almost all new DocuSP servers are X86 based, 64 bit, dual processor capable. Configuration varies with application, with the upper end DocuColor DocuSP getting up to 8 GB of ram and dual processors. These have been very reliable, and use off the shelf components obtainable locally. They still run Solaris as the OS, but it's Solaris for Intel.
Current X86 DocuSP (now renamed FFPS) for the DocuTech/DocuPrint EPS is 62, with 7.0 showing up on the upper end DocuColor servers and the odd B&W. The newer DocuSP (sorry, FFPS) has a very attractive look, ice cream colors, etc, etc and a lot of nice features. Xerox claims that the X86 FFPS runs 30% faster than the Sparc version.
In terms of applicability, all of the above boxes are "drop on" replacements for old Ultra 2 and Ultra 60 servers, with little more effort required than setting hostname, IP address, and creating queues. Wizards take all the effort out of IP and hostname changes.
