I feel like I can speak to this with some authority...
Generally, the reason any company uses OEL is because they're running DBMS (and related products) and they've been convinced/intimidated by an Oracle rep that there will support compatibilities with any other combination (generally in the form of "Oracle will just blame any performance issues on the OS") which is ironic given the RHEL "binary-compatibility"... and/or more importantly, they've been informed there will be "trouble" with their licensing if they use anything else... "Shame if we had to come in here and audit you and declare you have to license every CPU in your data center because you're running Oracle on an unauthorized hypervisor..."

The meat of this announcement, such as it was, was that they REALLY want more ISVs to directly certify their products on OEL so they can be a part of that whole ecosystem more. It is where Red Hat really has a core strength right now (and probably core profits) and definitely where Oracle will be hurt post-9.2 if that continues.

For IT:

Try HARD to get an internship with someone, even if most of the summer is spent just stuffing envelopes... Just while you're there let the real IT staff know that you'd be happy to be a cable pulling monkey for the chance to occassionally look over their shoulder. A lot of the middle tier IT guys I work with didn't even start out with college degrees but instead started as tape operators, roof-rats setting up antennas, or spent their first summers almost entirely UNDER raised floors pulling CAT5, but they paid attention when the new IBM and HP servers were brought in, they learned how to automate some of their tape tasks with scripting, and they definitely helped learn the routers as they were being installed. I recall one instance where the actual field engineer was running into a problem getting one router to update its route tables properly, and the summer intern behind him said "why don't you do x?" which , of course, got the engineer a bit huffy, but the kid also happened to be right.

Try to help out your colleges IS people too, if you can, and work to get a chance to help with the bigger equipment. Volunteer as grunt labor for any major push projects they might be doing.

The disadvantage of all this is it pays little to none, but it does let you build "experience" and definitely exposes you to the higher end equipment. Be a voracious reader of any material, manuals, coursework that you can get your hands on as well.