[Beermotor]

NASA's IT used to be split into the field centers and a central core IT organization. The field centers managed their own stuff, but anything agency-wide was handled by the core IT organization. Central IT also usually won out when there was a conflict.

When NASA combined their disparate field center mail systems into one (OneNASA and later NOMAD) massive mail system in 2006-2008 they deployed everything that wasn't the squishy Exchange underbelly on SuSE Enterprise 10.

The field centers were very invested in RHEL. Mostly for scientific software and Oracle.

JPL has traditionally been separate from the rest of NASA and works with CalTech for their infrastructure.