You definitely want to go with option #1. From Questions about version numbers:
Q. What is a "rolling" release?
A. The "rolling" releases are our test releases. They are the equivalent to what
another vendor calls "rawhide". We call them rolling because they are always rolling
along and rarely stable.
They are not meant to be stable. They are not meant to be used in a production
environment. They are for testing purposes only. Depending on where we are in our
testing the rolling can be a beta, a release candidate, and for a short time, will
even match a current release.
The development team of Scientific Linux does not guarantee that a rolling
release will work. We want to make that clear. Although the rolling releases
might work just fine for the majority of the time, we might also just happen to be
testing some product that does something you don't want it to do.
The rolling option has a much larger likelihood of introducing significant unwanted changes to your systems than option #1 has.
Either way, I guarantee you that Fermilab and CERN aren't doing dist-upgrades to their systems every 6 months. Scientific Linux supports this by making their Security Errata repository available, which includes the security patches for your specific release of SL. They specifically state that this removes the requirement for administrators to upgrade their systems with each release.
From How To Upgrade To The Latest S.L. 6.x Release:
Scientific Linux was designed so that an administrator can easily upgrade their
computer between minor releases.
It is not required that administrators upgrade their release, because the security
errata will be updated for all releases. But there are often features and/or
packages included in later releases that were not available with the earlier
releases.
You were spot on about one thing, though. SL is "f*cking great for an Enterprise". :)
Best Answer
There are many ways to handle suspend and hibernate capabilities, many of the old methods are deprecated. This has made searching for solutions difficult, as it seems every solution is completely unrelated to the next. With that said...
The method currently recommended, advocated from http://pm-utils.freedesktop.org/wiki/, should be available for most recent distributions. I would first check if you have
pm-utilsinstalled, and if the included commands are operating as expected.View if the package is installed, enter this command in terminal
This should output the version you have installed. If you don't get the expected output, you need to install the package.
Once you get that verified, test out your ability to suspend.
If You don't suspend, and get no output why, check the your recent dmesg output
This should help get you started, once you get some clues its much easier to go further down the trail. Post back with comments regarding your results, I can get you through the rest.