Dell PowerEdge 9G servers (x9xx, 840, 860, SC1435, and SC440) can work well with Debian, provided you have a new-enough kernel or are willing to backport drivers from a new-enough kernel to your older kernel. The three PowerEdge components that cause the most difficulty for new Debian sysadmins are the PERC 5 SAS RAID controllers (megaraid_sas driver), the SAS 5 non-RAID controllers (mptsas driver