[USER] OpenPower 720 support?

[Kevin P. Fleming]

(I'm posting here in spite of the warnings about this being a "developer 
only" list... I'm doing this because all the other lists are down/gone, 
and dwmw2 suggested I post here instead. Flame me if necessary <G>)

I'm looking at buying an OpenPower 720 instead of a number of x86-64 
boxes, for use as a web hosting/email hosting/offsite data 
storage/MySQL/etc. box. Initially I'd have 6 LPARs, growing to maybe as 
many as 20. I'm looking at a 2-way 1.65GHz box (4-way box with 2 CPUs), 
4GB of RAM, FC HBAs, HMC, etc.

My question, though, is that I'm not really keen on using SLES9, and I 
really want to use the 2.6 kernel so that rules out RHES. I am perfectly 
comfortable building my own distro to put on this system, but I'm 
concerned that things like LPAR support and other fancy bits are not 
present in the kernel.org kernel and I'd be losing access to the 
features I'm paying for.

Can anyone give me some thoughts on whether using one of these machines 
with an in-house distro is a wise move?