Fortinet®, the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, announced an integrated solution featuring FortiGate VM, Fortinet’s virtual cloud firewall, running directly on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). This integration embeds networking and brings isolated infrastructure acceleration into the AI Factory, allowing core security functions to run on BlueField instead of the host. By moving protection into the data center infrastructure itself, the solution helps enterprises secure high-performance private cloud and AI environments without slowing critical workloads.
“As enterprises are modernizing their data centers to support AI, private cloud and edge applications require much higher throughput than traditional workloads. 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,” said Mr. John Whittle, Chief Operating Officer at Fortinet.
“AI factories demand an entirely new class of secure, accelerated infrastructure. 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,” said Mr. Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA.
A New Era of Infrastructure Acceleration
As AI and private-cloud architectures evolve, organizations are building high-density accelerated computing clusters and faster data center fabrics to support latency-sensitive workloads. By bringing isolated infrastructure acceleration directly into the compute stack, organizations can keep pace with AI-scale traffic and maintain consistent protection across their environments.
Powered by the FortiOS operating system, FortiGate VM delivers industry-leading next-generation firewall capabilities that secures hybrid and multi-cloud, and now AI factories, with consistent security policies and centralized visibility and management, reducing complexity for security teams. Integrating FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField allows organizations to offload core security functions, including firewalling, segmentation, and zero-trust controls from the host CPU to the DPU.
This shift eliminates performance impact while improving multitenant isolation, throughput, and inspection accuracy for AI workloads. Deployed on BlueField, FortiGate VM enforces segmentation policies directly within the infrastructure fabric. As a result, organizations gain the following performance and security benefits:
- Zero-impact high-performance: FortiGate VM running on BlueField executes on the DPU, bypassing the host CPU, reducing latency and enabling higher throughput for massive traffic loads.
- Zero-trust segmentation and isolation: BlueField offloads networking and security functions in an isolated trust domain, purpose-built for isolating the security plane from compute workloads.
- Simplified private-cloud integration: The validated guide covers configuration using standard Open vSwitch bridges (OVS switches for WAN and VXLAN LAN tunnels) and deployment of FortiGate VM images on BlueField-enabled servers.
- Scalable multitenant architectures: The solution is ideal for cloud service providers, Telco edge, and enterprise private clouds needing hardware-accelerated inspection, secure isolation, and service chaining at scale.
Bringing High-Speed Security to High-Speed AI Infrastructure
Traditional host-based firewall architectures struggle to keep pace with the demands of AI workloads, edge services, agentic AI–era traffic, and multitenant isolation. With FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField, organizations get:
- Security inspection with zero host-impact: Security is implemented at the hardware level, yet software defined.
- Infrastructure-embedded zero-trust: BlueField anchors firewall and segmentation at the network-fabric level.
- Operational efficiency and scale: Converged networking and security offloads reduce infrastructure complexity and total cost of ownership.
Availability and Support
The FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField solution is supported starting with FortiOS 7.6.3. Customers and service providers should contact their Fortinet sales representative for access to the validated hardware configurations and deployment guide.
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