When NASDEV was first built, the storage requirement seemed fairly straightforward.
Put some disks in a machine, create a filesystem, share the storage over the network and keep everything backed up.
That sounds simple enough.
Then I started working seriously with ZFS.
It quickly became apparent that ZFS wasn't simply another filesystem. It represented a fundamentally different way of thinking about storage.
NASDEV didn't start with a grand plan to build a Solaris-based infrastructure platform.
It started with a desire to build a useful system and, at the same time, keep learning.
Solaris happened to be the operating system that made the most sense for that journey.
And once Solaris became part of NASDEV, it proved remarkably difficult to replace.
The NASDEV server began in 2007 as a personal project to build a capable home server while continuing to explore Solaris, ZFS, networking and systems administration.
What started as a relatively simple storage system has gradually evolved into a much more capable platform supporting network storage, services, development environments, virtualised workloads and the NASDEV website itself.
Rather than replacing the system every few years, the approach has been to evolve it.