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The first public beta of Red Hat Linux 7.2 was just posted, and the biggest change for server use will be the operating systems default use of the ext3 file system, the next version of the Linux Second Extended File System.
ext3 adds file journaling features to the file system, writing changes to disk in two places: Changes are immediately written to a transaction log and later written (when a checkpoint happens) to the affected data blocks themselves. This double-entry system provides a major safety improvement because changes are always stored on disk at least once.
In addition, if a crash occurs, file system recovery will be much faster. While ext2 can require many minutes to check a file system for errors, in my tests, ext3 recovered each file system in just 1 to 2 seconds after I reset a server without a proper shutdown.