For anyone looking to build a NAS device I highly recommend FreeNAS. It has a variety of options but I was most interested in NFS/iSCSI for my Vmware ESXi lab.
I built a white box FreeNAS server and was having some troubles with my new M1015 SAS card. I flashed it according to this post and I verified the firmware was correct (P16 as of the newest release).
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
For whatever reason the card would not recognize my drives that I had attached. After an hour of troubleshooting I realized that there is a difference in breakout cables. There are two types; reverse and forward cables. You must purchase forward cables otherwise your drives will never be detected! You can find a link to the correct cables below:
Correct:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116097
Incorrect:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133033