Fortinet has announced an integrated solution deploying its FortiGate VM virtual firewall directly on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). According to Fortinet, this integration enables security functions such as firewalling, segmentation, and zero-trust controls to run on the DPU, isolating them from the host CPU and directly embedding protection into the data center infrastructure. The company claims this approach secures high-performance private cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) data center environments, delivering consistent security without impacting workload performance.
FortiGate VM is powered by the FortiOS operating system and provides next-generation firewall capabilities for hybrid, multi-cloud, and AI data center environments. By running FortiGate VM on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU, core security processes—including segmentation and zero-trust enforcement—are offloaded from the host server to the DPU. This architecture is designed to decrease latency, increase throughput, and improve multitenant isolation for large-scale AI and private-cloud workloads.
With security policies enforced at the DPU level, the solution supports zero-impact, high-throughput inspection for traffic loads common in AI factories and modern data centers. Standard Open vSwitch bridges (for wide-area network and VXLAN tunneling) are supported for private-cloud integration, and deployment of FortiGate VM images is designed for BlueField-enabled servers. This solution targets cloud service providers, telecommunications edge deployments, and enterprise private-cloud data centers that require hardware-accelerated inspection and secure workload isolation.
Describing the technical benefits, Fortinet Chief Operating Officer John Whittle stated, “Integrating FortiGate VM on BlueField-3 DPU gives customers a practical way to keep security aligned with these new performance demands. By moving firewalling, segmentation, and zero-trust controls on the DPU, we help organizations improve isolation, reduce latency, and simplify consistent policy enforcement across their environments.”
NVIDIA Senior Vice President of Networking Kevin Deierling added, “By running FortiGate VM directly on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, we’re extending the model of infrastructure-offloaded services to include advanced security. This collaboration allows organizations to enforce firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust policies at line rate, without impacting GPU workloads. Together with Fortinet, we’re delivering the secure, high-performance fabric customers need to build and scale their AI-powered data centers with confidence.”
Fortinet reports the solution is available starting with FortiOS 7.6.3. Hardware configuration and deployment guides are available from Fortinet representatives.
Source: Fortinet
