The EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage platform is designed to manage storage infrastructure (the Control Plane) and the data residing within that infrastructure (the Data Plane), allowing service providers and IT departments to drive toward the operational model of web-scale data centers without building a custom environment. The Control Plane can be decoupled from the Data Plane, allowing the use of both together — or enabling use of only the Control Plane to manage the underlying intelligence of the storage arrays through policy-based automation. Additional features include the ability to view objects as files and provides file access performance without the latency inherent to object storage, and the capability to be implemented entirely in software run against EMC, non-EMC and commodity hardware.