RedHat or SuSe is definately the go.... (Score 1)

I love Debian as much as the next person, however after recently being involved in a project which required Debian (Woody) to be installed on IBM x345's with ServeRAID 6x controllers I would strongly recommend sticking with a distro like RedHat ES, AS or SuSE Ent which is fully supported by IBM. The support for ServeRAID controllers using the ips.o module is fairly poor and in my situation I had to first install RedHat and then do a chroot install of Debian to get the O/S to install successfully. It was a painful process to say the least. Now that the box is up and running we have rescue floppy's with the custom kernel and modules compiled in, but it still makes for some interesting DR measures. I have also been to quite a few IBM seminars of late and they are pushing the RedHat and SuSE barrows, and they seem to be backing this up with a fair injection of $'s into RedHat and SuSE.