How the AFA platform differs from the Hybrid platform
AFA platforms differ from Hybrid platforms in a few significant ways. You should understand these differences before using your AFA cluster.
The following table describes the differences between AFA and Hybrid systems:
| Difference | Description |
|---|---|
| SSD drives | Only SSD drives are supported on AFA platforms. If non-SSD drives are attached to an AFA platform, the disks do not go online. If the root aggregate is HDD-based, the nodes do not boot. HDDs are not supported. |
| Performance | AFA systems provide maximum I/O performance. |
| Volumes | All volumes created in aggregates owned by an AFA node have inline compression and inline deduplication enabled by default. |
| SVMs | The storage efficiency polices for SVMs differ from those on a Hybrid system. |
| Root-data partitioning | The root-data-data partitioning capability is enabled by default on an AFA node. |
| Mixed platform support | You cannot pair an AFA node with a regular Hybrid node in an HA pair. You can mix AFA HA pairs with Hybrid HA pairs in a switched cluster. |
| Zero block elimination | Instead of writing incoming 4 KB blocks that contain all zeroes to storage media, AFA systems indicate the block's inode as all zeroes. With deduplication enabled, zero block elimination is enabled on all volumes by default with no user configuration required. |
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