Almost any of them can work well. If you are a competent admin and architect, you can make any distro work. But competent admins and architects generally already know several distros very well and wouldn't get much value from this discussion. So your real problem seems to be that you're worried that you don't have the proper skill set.
Basically: you're asking the wrong question. Either develop the expertise yourself, or hire someone who already knows this stuff and trust their judgement. Asking a bunch of internet yahoos for their opinion on a platform choice is just going to cause a flamewar (c.f. bootload's post above).
All that being said: I've had plenty of experience on Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS and like them both. Debian is rougher but works once you know it well. Stay away from Gentoo except as a teaching tool. And *BSD and Solaris are also good choices if you have the staff buy-in (i.e. don't cause friction with your IT folks, let them use what they like).
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Almost any of them can work well. If you are a competent admin and architect, you can make any distro work. But competent admins and architects generally already know several distros very well and wouldn't get much value from this discussion. So your real problem seems to be that you're worried that you don't have the proper skill set.
Basically: you're asking the wrong question. Either develop the expertise yourself, or hire someone who already knows this stuff and trust their judgement. Asking a bunch of internet yahoos for their opinion on a platform choice is just going to cause a flamewar (c.f. bootload's post above).
All that being said: I've had plenty of experience on Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS and like them both. Debian is rougher but works once you know it well. Stay away from Gentoo except as a teaching tool. And *BSD and Solaris are also good choices if you have the staff buy-in (i.e. don't cause friction with your IT folks, let them use what they like).