Quoting listmail at brentfriedman.net:

> I am about to set up a new venture using Linux servers.  I have used
> everything from slackware to debian to ubuntu for personal and non-public
> server use, but I haven't set up any "live" servers with Linux since
> Redhat switched to Fedora Core.  The servers will be running a php web
> service, with a mySQL back end.
>
> I will not be the main admin for these boxes, as I will be pretty busy
> with the business end of the venture.  I am looking for a distro that has
> as automated a update/patch installation system as possible, whether free
> or less than $500/server/year.  Also, it would be helpful if the update
> system was GUI based.  Any suggestions about what you are using in a
> production environment would be really helpful.
>
> As a follow-on question, I plan to pick up a few Dell Poweredge 2650 dual
> xeon systems on ebay.  Any thoughts on these systems running linux?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brent Friedman
>

You've already got quite a few opinions, but bits are cheap so I'll throw mine
in as well. Debian makes for a pretty good server distro, but I've never used
their GUI update tools, not sure how good they are. All my Debian experience
has been from the CLI. They are stable and each release has a pretty 
long shelf
life, so you won't need to be upgrading your distro every year. Fedora suffers
from that particular ill, the "official" support doesn't last long, but there
are projects out there with people trying to provide updates beyond the
"official" supported dates.

On the commercial side, I'd suggest Red Hat. It is admittedly some time since
I've fooled with SuSe, but the experience was not good. I didn't like Yast,
didn't like the odd behaviors I found, didn't like the mix of proprietary and
OSS stuff, though I understand that most of SuSe has been opened since
acquisition by Novell. Alternatively there are clones of RHEL such as Taos,
Centos and White Box Linux. They just strip the copyrighted references 
from the
RHEL SRPM's and compile them.

I've had excellent luck running Linux on PowerEdge hardware.

Josh