Some important details of running Debian on enterprise hardware worth keeping in mind. A probable subtitle,

“The hazzards of buying server hardware on the cheap”

Debian Benefits:
-Much more feature-filled installer. The RHEL installer has unexpected issues outside of their defaults.
-Many more packages
-Much more flexibility and potential
-Someone has probably already done what you want to do on Debian.
-Someone can answer your more specific, production-versus-dev-way-of-thinking questions.
-Other file systems support. Knowledge is very limited outside RHEL support contracts.

Drawbacks:
-Vendor support specifically for Debian is almost non-existent. The sound of crickets when you use cat /proc/network/dev and not their web-based gui to get ethernet stats is absurd. Tip: just say “Okay.” and send it along.
-Some of the very fine details of admining the hardware are not worked out. For example, Dell’s hardware RAID manager doesn’t get a device node. It’s not a huge deal, but fiddly. Make the device node in /etc/rc.local and Bob’s yer uncle.

Sysadmin Consequences:
When the business you work for curses you with cheap hardware make a note that you will be on the phone longer and woken up more often. You will have inferior to non-existent vendor supplied tools so you have to go elsewhere to make up for them. They cut corners to offer a perceived lower price and so the burden of the corner cutting passes straight to you and your mates in the 24-7 support rotation.

With that in mind, going with a ’supported’ distro (RHEL) versus Debian doesn’t make your situation any better.
Unless it is HP hardware, the management tools will be inferior and jail-like, so you will have to find other administration software anyway.
Hardware issues are rarely, if ever distro specific so, that RHEL support contract is just money down the drain.
If they are buying really cheap hardware, it’s just desktop hardware in a 1U/2U/etc. package, so it doesn’t matter at all what distro you are running.