Abstract
This white paper describes how data storage needs to become more software-defined to address the expectations of an increasingly mobile user community. Data has cloud properties now and users demand data to be available at anytime, anywhere. IT must meet this demand or risk losing users to public clouds. IT can realize the benefits of software-defined storage with an architecture that abstracts physical storage and centrally manages it in the control plane while leveraging the capabilities in existing storage infrastructure investments in the data plane.