During theCube’s live coverage of EMC World 2013, Prasad Rampalli, Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering at EMC, sat down with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante and discussed his experience with EMC’s software-defined storage platform, ViPR.

Rampalli began his discussion on ViPR by stating, “ViPR is the best thing that has happened to solutions. ViPR has got RESTful APIs that completely put the semantics on the type of storage capabilities that can be exposed.” This makes it possible to create plug-ins with the ViPR API that will work, guaranteed, across all EMC platforms.

It’s still too early for a true review on ViPR’s performance on a larger scale, since deployments are still few, but, according to Rampalli, ViPR performs well in current lab tests. “The key part is really tying to solution. I can’t emphasize that enough,” he reminded us, “Single-click, writing application integration capability in a matter of hours or days versus weeks. That’s great.”

Dave Vellante then raised the question of ViPR awareness, pointing out that, at the CIO level, users may still be confused about what ViPR can bring to the table. “I think there has to be education about what ViPR is all about,” Rampalli admits, “But it’s not exactly a new [concept]. It’s an extension of cloud computing. We’re just extending that concept to storage. It’s the exact same thing that VMware has done to compute that we’re now enabling with storage.”

While any savvy technologist can tell you about new technology approaching, the real challenge will always be how to integrate and exploit it. “The heavy lifting is really the actual deployment of ViPR in the context of the application and the legacy environment of the CIO’s IT environment,” Rampalli explained.  The role of EMC’s solutions department is to create reference architectures for specific environments and use cases, now tied with a much faster medium for integration, which is ViPR.