All of those things you speak of are not things a web server should do, they are things a HPC server / compute node does. I'll have to agree with @davidr that U

All of those things you speak of are not things a web server should do, they are things a HPC server / compute node does. I'll have to agree with @davidr that Ubuntu is very painful for those types of environments. Ubuntu + Infiniband? Ask Canonical how many people they have working on Infiniband... I dare you :) The answer will be exactly 0. Canonical's focus is on phones, tablets, and desktops. Mark simply does not take the server as a serious use case. Clearly redhat doesn't know what they are doing, they've only built the first billion dollar purely open source company. Since RedHat employs a very very large number of upstream kernel.org Linux kernel hackers, don't you think that maybe, just maybe they backport some of those newer features into their old stable kernels? As one of the parents alluded to (open vswitch and namespacing support), yet again the answer is yes. Pure Debian isn't bad granted, but it simply doesn't compare to Redhat. I just don't see them as the same league. Canonical is a sales organization parading (poorly) as an engineering organization. However, they have done absolutely wonderful things for marketing Linux before Android came out so they do deserve respect where it is do. What do I know, I've only worked in large multithousand node environments my entire career </snark>