From what I have been finding on the net is that most all Sun RAID setups are software? Is it really that uncommon for Sun servers to have hardware RAID?

Not at all, there's loads of hardware raid implementations that work on Sun gear. It's just SCSI or FC after all.

Sun sell a bunch of kit that can do RAID also (but I have little experiance with it as we largly use SAN and software raid on the internal disks).

Yea, I got my hands on an old e450 that I want to use as a backup server and it seems like it doesn't have hardware raid on it... I'm going to have to do it by software.

Hi there,

I think the Sun software RAID works pretty well. We use Solaris Volume Manager to set up RAID 1+0 on a heavily used db server and it works fine.

In fact we are not using the built-in RAID capabilities on the attached storage arrays as we wanted dual redundancy over both units (using SVM to bolt together the presented LUNs).

Had not problems with it at all both in work and at home to be honest.

Si

yes, the SUN V440 servers come with hardware raid.
can be setup with the raidctl command.

most people find the software raid to be more flexable and so use that insted.

SUN's software raid is called SVM (Solaris Volume Manager)
Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide

go for solaris 10 and use ZFS to build your raid... it can't be any easier!

Yea, I was reading that 10 is cake for setting up software RAID.