Fortinet joins the VMware NSX Partner Ecosystem

Rapid industry adoption of cloud and virtual infrastructure has created a need for transforming the way security is applied in the data center. With Fortinet’s new VMX solution, VMware vSphere and VMware NSX customers will be able to leverage Fortinet’s leading approach to security, which automates the orchestration of network security with seamless centralized management across physical and virtual domains.

“The SDDC promises a highly automated, easily managed platform that embraces and secures all applications, for fast, safe deployment across data centers, clouds and mobile devices,” said Mary Yang, vice president of business development and Fortinet. “Fortinet and VMware are uniquely positioned to deliver on this promise, providing the highest levels of security in virtualized environments.”

In many data center environments, hardware security appliances are deployed at the aggregation layer and can only see “north-south” traffic passing through the physical network. Conversely, inter-VM traffic (i.e. “east-west” traffic) does not leave the virtual switch in the virtual host, and network virtualization and software-defined architectures further exacerbate the volume of virtual traffic.

To address these challenges, the FortiGate-VMX solution interoperates with VMware virtualization solutions in the SDDC, providing API integration that gives customers greater visibility and control of virtual network traffic regardless of network topology. In addition, orchestration with VMware’s platform allows for automatic protection of new workloads. Key FortiGate-VMX features include:

o Current interoperability with VMware vSphere and vCloud Suite®
o Future interoperability with VMware NSX
o Centralized management across FortiGate-VMX security appliances
o Visibility into all vSphere virtual network traffic
o Auto-deployment and provisioning FortiGate-VMX elastically to new ESXi hosts
o Instant-on protection of new VM workloads
o Ability to retail session-state across vMotion® live migration events
o Object-based protection rules that follow VM’s across IP or MAC address changes

“Purpose-built virtual security appliances will be increasingly used alongside hardware appliances to secure enterprise data centers, which are becoming increasingly dynamic due to rapid adoption of server virtualization and SDN, “ said Jeff Wilson, Principal Analyst, Security for Infonetics. “Fortinet is doing well in enterprise data centers, with a string of new customer wins and highly competitive hardware price-to-performance; this success will be bolstered by virtual appliance integration with VMware’s virtualization and SDDC platform.”