Simplification through abstraction - Fleet management abstracts away the complexity of managing individual storage infrastructure. Instead of dealing with cluster-by-cluster configuration, you manage your storage estate as a unified whole, reducing operational overhead and decision fatigue.

Consistency and scalability - Without clear organization, different teams make different decisions for similar workloads, leading to fragmented configurations. Fleet management lets you apply standards across dozens of systems at once, ensuring new workloads start from the same baseline across teams and fleets.

Governance and control - As teams grow, you need clear boundaries for who can manage what. Fleet management provides those boundaries through organizational structure and access control, ensuring that storage decisions remain governed and auditable.

Organization - The top level representing your company.

Folders - Help you organize related fleets. For example, you might create a folder for each region or business unit, then create fleets within each folder. Folders can contain other folders or fleets. When you assign a role at the folder level, members inherit that role for all fleets within the folder.

Fleets - Group the storage systems you manage together. You associate storage systems with fleets and assign members to fleets to grant them access.

By environment - Create separate fleets for production, development, and test workloads. This keeps production storage under tighter policies while allowing more flexibility in lower environments.

By business unit - Group clusters that serve a specific department, such as finance, engineering, or HR, into a dedicated fleet. You can then assign storage management responsibilities to team members within that business unit without exposing other fleets to them.

By location or data center - When clusters are distributed across sites, organizing by location lets you monitor site-level health, apply region-specific policies, and track capacity consumption per site.

By application tier - Group clusters that host a specific class of workload, such as databases, file shares, or virtual machines, so you can apply consistent standards tuned to that workload type across the entire fleet.

Folder-level access - When you assign a role at the folder level, the member inherits that role for all fleets and resources within the folder. This lets you delegate administrative responsibilities without granting access to the entire organization.

Fleet-level access - When you assign a role at the fleet level, the member has access only to the storage systems within that fleet. This lets you delegate storage management to team members or application owners without exposing unrelated parts of your infrastructure.

Fleets define the scope where you manage storage. A fleet groups systems so you can control access, apply standards consistently, and manage resources as a unit.

Storage class policies define standards as reusable building blocks (performance, capacity, security, data protection).

Storage classes express workload intent. A storage class is a named template assembled from one or more policies.

Provisioning workflows create storage within guardrails. Different workflows make configuration decisions differently, but all can enforce storage classes and remain governed by RBAC and audit logging.

Manual provisioning - You select the target system and specify configuration details directly. Use this when you need explicit control over system selection and configuration.

Automated provisioning - You provide workload inputs and optionally select a storage class. Console local deployment recommends best-fit placement and applies class-driven settings to reduce manual decisions.

AI-assisted (agentic) provisioning - You describe what you need in natural language. Console local deployment proposes a plan constrained by RBAC and storage classes, then provisions only after you review and approve.

To understand storage standards, see Learn about storage classes and policies in NetApp Console local deployment.

To create and manage fleets, see Manage folders and fleets.

Provision storage manually

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