Migration options

[Bill Fung]

I am working in a university and I am maintaining several servers 
installed with RedHat 6.2, 7.2, 9. Since RedHat will not give support at 
all these version soon, I am considering whether to go for fedora or 
rhel 3 or other linux distribution (eg. debian).

First, I would like to know about the differences between fedora and 
rhel 3. I have read through the web page of redhat and fedora.
1) Could I put it into simple words, Fedora is just like RedHat 6.2, 
7.... 9, except it doesn't have any further rpm patch update from 
redhat? And rhel 3 is a continuation of rhel 2.
2) If that is the case, how could I upgrade fedora when there is 
security hole? compile the new source myself?
3) Is there a centralize and easy patching system on Fedora for 
deploying patch on mass servers? yum!?
4) I am also serious considering migration the RedHat servers to other 
linux distribution such as debian. But I think the migration would be 
difficult. Any suggestion or comment?
5) a stupid question, is Fedora as stable as RedHat 9? I think so.

Btw, my application on these servers are mainly apache, innd and perl 
apllications.

Thanks,
Bill
HKUST