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Compare ASA r2 systems to other ONTAP systems

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ASA r2 systems offer a unified hardware and software solution for SAN-only environments built on all flash platforms. ASA r2 systems vary from other ONTAP systems (ASA, AFF, and FAS) in the implementation of its storage layer, supported protocols, and ONTAP personality.

On an ASA r2 system, ONTAP software is streamlined to provide support for essential SAN functionality while limiting the visibility and availability of non-SAN related features and functions. For example, System Manager running on an ASA r2 system does not display options to create home directories for NAS clients. This streamlined version of ONTAP is identified as the ASA r2 personality. ONTAP running on all other ONTAP systems (ASA, AFF, FAS) is identified as the unified ONTAP personality. The differences between ONTAP personalities are referenced in the ONTAP command reference (man pages), REST API specification, and EMS messages where applicable.

You can verify the personality of your ONTAP storage from System Manager or from the ONTAP CLI.

  • From the System Manager menu, select Cluster > Overview.

  • From the CLI, enter: san config show

The personality of your ONTAP storage system cannot be changed.

The storage layer for ONTAP systems running the unified ONTAP personality uses aggregates as the base unit of storage. An aggregate owns a specific set of the disks available in a storage system. The aggregate allocates space on the disks it owns to volumes for LUNs and namespaces. A unified ONTAP user can use the command line interface (CLI) to create and modify aggregates, volumes, LUNs and namespaces.

The storage layer in ASA r2 systems uses a storage availability zone instead of aggregates. A storage availability zone is a common pool of storage that has access to all available disks in the storage system. The storage availability zone is visible to both nodes in an ASA r2 HA pair. When a storage unit (based on either a LUN or an NVMe namespace) is created, ONTAP automatically creates a volume containing a storage virtual machine (VM) in the storage availability zone to house the storage unit. Because of this automated and simplified approach to storage management, certain System Manager options, ONTAP commands, and REST API endpoints are not available or have limited usage on an ASA r2 system. For example, because volume creation and management is automated for ASA r2 systems, the Volumes menu does not appear in System Manager and the volume create command is not supported.

ASA r2 storage compares to other ONTAP storage systems in the following ways:

ASA r2 ASA AFF FAS

ONTAP personality

ASA r2

ASA

Unified

Unified

SAN protocol support

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

NAS protocol support

No

No

Yes

Yes

Storage layer support

Storage availability zone

Aggregates

Aggregates

Aggregates

The following ASA platforms are classified as ASA r2 systems:

  • ASA A1K

  • ASA A70

  • ASA A90

For more information

Summary of ASA r2 system differences

The major differences between ASA r2 systems and FAS, AFF, and ASA systems relevant to the ONTAP command line interface (CLI) and REST API are described below.

Default SVM creation with protocol services

New clusters automatically contain a default data SVM with the SAN protocols enabled. IP data LIFs support iSCSI and NVMe/TCP protocols and use the default-data-blocks service policy by default.

Automatic volume creation

Creating a storage unit (LUN or namespace) automatically creates a volume from the storage availability zone. This results in a simplified and common namespace. Deleting a storage unit automatically deletes the associated volume.

Changes to thin and thick provisioning

Storage units for are always thinly provisioned on ASA r2 storage systems. Thick provisioning is not supported.