There are silent corruption bugs in storage drivers for example. Having that kind of competency in-house is too expensive for most companies.(Not Spotify in this case, but problem could be much harder to fix)
That is the description of a hardware problem that the vendor they bought the hardware from was unable to resolve due to an unsupported OS.
That is where picking the right hardware vendor comes in. I wouldn't ask my OS vendor to support my hardware choices unless they specifically certified it. Neither Debian or Ubuntu certified that raid card...which puts you back to square 1 again, rendering their support moot.
http://labs.spotify.com/2013/01/28/finding-the-right-needle-...