Cybersecurity company Fortinet Inc. today announced an integrated solution featuring FortiGate-VM, its virtual cloud firewall, running directly on the Nvidia BlueField-3 data processing unit.

The integration embeds networking and brings isolated infrastructure acceleration into the AI factory, allowing core security functions to run on BlueField instead of the host. An AI factory is a data center environment purpose-built to develop, train and run artificial intelligence models at arge scale. It combines accelerated compute, high-speed networking and tightly integrated infrastructure services such as security and data management.

The integration moves protection into the data center infrastructure itself to help enterprises secure high-performance private cloud and AI environments without slowing critical workloads.

The idea behind the integration is to bring isolated infrastructure acceleration directly into the compute stack to allow organizations to keep pace with AI-scale traffic and maintain consistent protection across their environments.

This comes at a time when organizations are building high-density accelerated computing clusters and faster data center fabrics to support latency-sensitive workloads that have higher performance demands. Fortinet argues that by moving firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust controls to the DPU, the integration will help organizations improve isolation, reduce latency and simplify consistent policy enforcement across their environment.

Fortinet VM, powered by the FortiOS operating system, offers next-generation firewall capabilities that secure hybrid, multicloud and now AI factories. It has security policies and centralized visibility and management that help reduce complexity for security teams.

The integration of FortiGate-VM on Nvidia BlueField also allows organizations to offload core security functions, including firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust controls, from the host central processing unit to the DPU.

“AI factories demand an entirely new class of secure, accelerated infrastructure,” explains Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking at Nvidia. “By running FortiGate-VM directly on Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs, we’re extending the model of infrastructure-offloaded services to include advanced security.”

Noting that the integration allows organizations to enforce firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust policies at line rate, Deierling added that “together with Fortinet, we’re delivering the secure, high-performance fabric customers need to build and scale their AI-powered data centers with confidence.”

With FortiGate-VM on Nvidia BlueField, organizations obtain security inspection with zero host impact, infrastructure-embedded zero trust and operational efficiency and scale. The solution is supported starting with FortiOS 7.6.3.

Photo: Fortinet