Redhat licensing is pretty steep as well, at least in my humble opinion. However, for non-prod servers you can always use CentOS, which is the same thing with cosmetic changes minus support. You can save a =lot= of money that way.
There are also more free alternatives, but in a production environment, you really want some kind of support.
You mean I'm not supposed to run CentOS on my production machines? Uh-oh... :-)