I've given a lot of thought into what direction furfly will go in regards to hardware and operating systems. Our needs are compounded by the need to support a number of "classic" ACS sites (like edwardtufte.com or archnet.org) running old versions of ACS/Oracle.
Here's what we're going to do:
As older Linux hardware comes up for it's upgrade cycle it will be upgraded from Red Hat 7.x to Red Hat Enterprise. New hardware purchased for new sites, as well as hardware for support services (DNS, mail, backups, etc.), will be Apple G5 Xserves running OS X Server. Services running on Sun Solaris systems will be migrated to Linux or -- more likely -- one of the new Xservers.
With the introduction of the G5 Xserve Apple has addressed my number one concern with their server hardware: ECC RAM. They've also switched to serial ATA and essentially cut the price of storage in the Xserve RAID by half.
