EMC is doing for storage what VMware did for servers with ViPR, a new software-defined storage solution for managing large scale data centers. The offering made its debut today at the annual EMC World 2013 conference in Las Vegas.

ViPR is pegged as a highly abstracted, vendor-agnostic platform built for service providers and large enterprises with sizable infrastructure footprints. It works by breaking down storage into two layers: a ‘Control Plane’ that includes provisioning, migration and other core functionality; and a ‘Data Plane’ that represents higher level Big Data capabilities.

Each plane has its own dedicated tool. The ViPR Controller provides a hardware abstraction layer that enables admins to carry out low-level tasks across multiple storage devices from different vendors without having to micromanage each solution. The software essentially transforms heterogeneous environments into easily-shared virtual storage pools, and it includes a point-and-click to make things even simpler.

ViPR Controller can be deployed as a standalone solution or together with ViPR Object Data Services, which handles the Data Plane. The latter replaces the traditional hierarchical tree-structure with a flat architecture that handles objects like regular files, and features APIs for Amazon S3 and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

ViPR is compatible with vSphere, OpenStack and Microsoft’s cloud tools. EMC expects that that the solution will become generally available sometime in the second half of 2012.

Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante provided his take on EMC’s new shift towards software-led storage in an interview this morning with SiliconAngle’s Kristin Feledy. He said that the announcement is a milestone update for EMC, but pointed out it may not be as vendor agnostic as the vendor claims it. He explains that it’s likely ViPR performs better on EMC’s products than on hardware from competing vendors.