Distros for server?

Linux comes in many different flavors or distros. That makes deciding which fits the server niche very hard. I've had that opportunity and i'm still scratcing my head :P

I have six shiny HP DL360 with 1M RAM and the whole shebang! and i've spent a few weeks deciding, or trying to decide, which distro i want to use to power my servers.

I've been using Red Hat all these while. And last year, I went with Fedora Core 1. So, i have all these experience with redhat, and jumping to a new distro might cause me some set back.

There are two obvious distros that i would like to try, but never had the opportunity; Debian and gentoo.

I've used some sort of Debian mutated distro (knoppix, gibraltar). But Debian woody is really a different beast altogether. Installation is ok. but the packages are erm old. well, to me at least.

I also installed gentoo on one of the boxes. now, this is a different beast altogether. i've never installed bsd, but i've heard that gentoo pretty much goes the bsd way.

there are binary package, but i guess source install (using emerge) is the way to go. it takes some getting use to, but after a while, i sorta liking it.

now, of the three, fedora and gentoo gives me access to schedutils. schedutils consists of apps that can be used to set cpu affinity, among others. and i want to set such thing since the boxes have multiple processors. now, getting that with debian woody means i need to upgrade a whole lot of other apps. that's not good. to me, at least.

So, now it's down to two. FC2 or gentoo. Why not debian sarge, or sid even? erm .. just bcoz? i don't know. really

So, what have others done? i'm sure i'm not the only one facing these options.

hmm.. i guess "eeny meeny meiny mo .."?