EMC is combining the development teams behind the VMAX line of high-end block storage systems and the VNX series unified arrays into a single Enterprise Storage Division. The group will be headed by Brian Gallagher.

David Goulden, the president and chief operating system of EMC, stressed in a blog post that the move involves “no changes to any products, product roadmaps or the way we take our products to market or how we support our customers.” The company will continue to offer VMAX and VNX separately.

“Both VMAX and VNX are block and file transactional systems that support mission critical workloads, common hardware and the use of key technologies. In the auto industry, automakers that offer different product lines for different segments of the market have demonstrated the benefits of sharing platforms, and we intend to leverage those benefits here. Bringing these teams together will allow us to accelerate innovation and maintain our leading edge in the storage industry,” Goulden explained in his piece.

Besides merging the VMAX and VNX units, EMC is also consolidating its VPLEX, RecoverPoint and Backup & Recovery teams. Headed by Guy Churchward, the new Data Protection & Availability Division will focus on making the firm’s arrays more reliable and provide software-defined data protection on top of ViPR.

EMC’s reorganization comes a week after Nicolas “Neela” Jacques, the former director of product marketing and senior cloud strategy at VMware, took over as the head of the OpenDaylight Project. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, OpenDaylight aims to create a set of common standards for SDN. The initiative is backed by networking vendors such as Cisco, Brocade and Ericsson as well as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell, Intel and other prominent players in adjacent segments.