a network has three planes...
management plane
control plane
and data plane
management plane - achieves the management goals of the network, manages traffic sent to a device, ie. applications and protocols such as snmp and ssh
control plane- manages traffic sent between devices, ie, BGP, EIGRP, OSPF
data plane- what else? forwards data through a device but does not manage traffic sent to the local ios device... see management planes
it's a bird, it's a plane... it's...