Fortinet, NVIDIA Integrate Security into AI Infrastructure with BlueField Acceleration
The solution enables firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust policy enforcement to run directly on the BlueField DPU rather than on the host CPU, allowing enterprises to secure AI, private cloud and edge workloads without impacting performance, according to a company statement.
Bengaluru, December 29: Fortinet, the global cybersecurity company, has announced a new integrated solution that embeds advanced security directly into accelerated AI and private-cloud infrastructure by running FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing units (DPUs). The collaboration is designed to deliver higher performance, stronger isolation, and simplified operations for AI factories and high-performance data centres.
The solution enables firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust policy enforcement to run directly on the BlueField DPU rather than on the host CPU, allowing enterprises to secure AI, private cloud and edge workloads without impacting performance, according to a company statement on Monday.
Security offloaded to infrastructure
As organisations modernise data centres to support AI-driven, latency-sensitive workloads, traditional host-based firewall architectures often struggle to keep pace. By offloading core security functions to the infrastructure layer, Fortinet and NVIDIA aim to provide line-rate security while preserving compute and GPU resources for AI workloads.
John Whittle, Chief Operating Officer at Fortinet, said integrating FortiGate VM on BlueField-3 allows enterprises to align security with new performance demands. He said the approach improves isolation, reduces latency and simplifies consistent policy enforcement across environments.
Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of networking at NVIDIA, said AI factories require a new class of secure, accelerated infrastructure. He noted that embedding advanced security services at the DPU level enables firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust controls at line rate without affecting GPU performance.
Built on FortiOS and BlueField acceleration
Powered by Fortinet’s FortiOS operating system, FortiGate VM delivers next-generation firewall capabilities across hybrid, multi-cloud and AI factory environments. When deployed on NVIDIA BlueField, the solution offloads networking and security tasks—including firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust controls—from the host CPU to the DPU.
According to the companies, this improves multitenant isolation, throughput and inspection accuracy, while enabling enforcement of segmentation policies directly within the data-centre fabric.
Key benefits for AI and private cloud
The integrated solution offers zero host-impact security by executing on the DPU, hardware-anchored zero-trust segmentation in an isolated trust domain, and simplified private-cloud integration using standard Open vSwitch configurations for WAN and VXLAN LAN tunnels. It is aimed at cloud service providers, telecom edge deployments and large enterprise private clouds requiring scalable, hardware-accelerated inspection and service chaining.
Availability
FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField is supported starting with FortiOS 7.6.3. Customers and service providers can access validated hardware configurations and deployment guides through Fortinet.
