Learn about storage fleets in NetApp Console local deployment
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A storage fleet groups storage systems that you manage together in NetApp Console local deployment. Use folders to group related fleets. You can apply policies, grant access, and monitor health at the needed scope.
Why fleets matter
As storage environments grow, managing individual clusters in isolation becomes impractical. Fleets give you a structured way to group related storage systems so you can act on them as a unit. Instead of configuring policies or access controls cluster by cluster, you apply them once at the fleet level. This reduces repetitive administrative work and ensures that every cluster in a fleet operates under the same standards.
How folders and fleets organize your resources
Your organization's resource hierarchy consists of folders and fleets. Folders group related fleets, and fleets group storage systems.
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Organization is the top level of the hierarchy and represents your company.
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Folders help you organize related fleets. For example, you might create a folder for each region or business unit, and then create fleets within each folder. Folders can contain other folders or fleets, but they cannot have storage systems directly associated with them. When you assign a role to a member at the folder level, the member inherits that role for all fleets within the folder.
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Fleets group the storage systems that you manage together. You associate storage systems with fleets and assign members to fleets to grant them access.
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Folders are an organizational tool and are not visible to members who do not have IAM permissions such as the Organization admin or Folder or fleet admin roles. Members access fleets, not folders. |
Fleet examples
How you organize fleets depends on your operational model. Common approaches include:
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By environment Create separate fleets for production, development, and test workloads. This keeps production storage under tighter performance and capacity policies while allowing more flexibility in lower environments.
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By business unit Group clusters that serve a specific department—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.
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By location or data center When clusters are distributed across sites, organizing by location lets you monitor site-level health, apply region-specific tiering policies, and track capacity consumption per site.
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By application tier Group clusters that host a specific class of workload—databases, file shares, or virtual machines—so you can apply a storage class tuned to that workload's performance profile across the entire fleet.
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Use folders to add another level of organization. For example, create a folder for each region and then create environment-based fleets within each regional folder. |
How fleets connect to storage classes
When you associate a storage class with a fleet, the Console local deployment applies the policies in that class to all storage provisioning within the fleet. Workloads provisioned inside the fleet automatically inherit the performance, capacity, and tiering rules defined in the storage class—without requiring administrators to select or verify policy settings at provisioning time. This makes fleets the primary way to enforce consistent storage behavior across clusters that serve a common purpose.
How folders and fleets support access control and visibility
Folders and fleets serve as the boundaries for user access:
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When you assign a role at the folder level, the member inherits that role for all fleets and resources within the folder. This lets Organization admins delegate administrative responsibilities by creating folders and assigning a Folder or fleet admin role. Those admins can then manage all fleets within their folder without access to the entire organization.
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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 granting them visibility into unrelated parts of your infrastructure. The Console local deployment provides fleet-level health and performance monitoring so you can see the status of all clusters in a fleet from a single view, identify issues early, and act before they affect workloads.