Dell wasted no time on Day 1 of its week-long Enterprise Forum in San Jose. The company unleashed an array of new products and announced an important strategic partnership with Oracle, which finally set its eyes on the hyperscale market.

Dell augmented its lineup with a set of Active System appliances that sport Active System Manager 7.1, the workload and deployment automation platform that powers its converged boxes. This latest release introduces support for third party hardware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, deeper integration with vCloud, and a set of prepackaged configuration templates for SQL Server.

The refreshed Active System lineup was announced in conjunction with the launch of Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences, a high-performance computing solution that Dell put together with help from Arizona’s Translational Genomics Research Institute. The 42U platform is purpose-built for genome analysis: Dell claims that the miniature supercomputer can process up to 38 genomes per day and crunch through 266 in a week.

The third notable addition to the vendor’s enterprise hardware lineup is the PowerEdge VRTX, a private cloud in a box solution that takes after VCE’s Vblocks and Netapp- and Cisco’s FlexPod reference architecture. The solution is designed for use in SMB environments where cost-efficiency and form factor are the most important considerations.

Other solutions Dell introduced at this week’s Enterprise Forum include an improved Modular Data Center (MDS) architecture, a couple of SDN-enabled networking solutions and a new suite of data center automation tools. The hardware giant also revealed a Joint Infrastructure Solution with Oracle. The two firms teamed-up to optimize Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, and Oracle Enterprise Manager for Dell’s x86 systems in a bid to expand into the growing hyperscale market.