Traditionally, protecting high-performance environments such as AI factories often involved making trade-offs between speed and security. However, the recent collaboration between Fortinet and NVIDIA signifies a shift in this paradigm. By leveraging the BlueField DPU to deploy critical security tasks, organizations can now achieve both speed and stringent security measures necessary for today’s sophisticated computing demands.
By integrating FortiGate VM within the data processing unit instead of the host CPU, organizations can implement high-performance security functions like firewalling, segmentation, and zero-trust policies seamlessly across networks without impeding the throughput required for AI workloads.
John Whittle, Fortinet’s Chief Operating Officer, stressed the significance of aligning security measures with the escalating performance requirements of AI and private cloud applications. Running key security functions on the DPU rather than traditional processing units enables enterprises to enhance system isolation, reduce latency, and ensure consistent policy enforcement – all crucial elements for scaling AI-driven data centers.
Kevin Deierling, NVIDIA’s Senior Vice President of Networking, also endorsed this innovative approach, highlighting the benefits of offloading security tasks to the DPU for organizations seeking accelerated infrastructure and advanced protection. This collaboration allows for the enforcement of security services without impacting GPU workloads, which is essential for operating at AI-scale.
Organizations are increasingly adopting private-cloud architectures coupled with high-density computing clusters to address the demands of modern, latency-sensitive workloads, enabling them to keep pace with AI-scale traffic while securing high-performance environments without compromises.
The FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField solution is supported by the FortiOS operating system renowned for its firewall capabilities. Now accessible starting with FortiOS 7.6.3, interested parties are encouraged to contact their Fortinet representatives for details on hardware configurations and deployment procedures.
