FortiHypervisor: Another Fortinet Innovation Milestone

Most organizations face challenges with deploying new networking services on traditional CPE.  They need to adapt quickly to changing business conditions, but their CPE infrastructure gets in the way of quickly deploying or customizing a service.  

The impact to business is real.  For one, it takes too long to deploy new services.  Traditional on-premises equipment is function-specific, resulting in multiple boxes being deployed for multiple services.  You need to add a new service?  This requires a new box, new software, and complex integration with existing services - all of which quickly adds more Capex and Opex, while also taking up valuable time.  For service providers, this can mean multiple truck rolls and lengthy deployment cycles which can quickly erase profitability and competitiveness. 

All of this has made it a daunting proposition for service providers to offer services quickly and cost effectively, as well as for enterprises to deploy the services they need in a timely manner.  

Until now.

Fortinet is introducing FortiHypervisor, a new generation of virtual CPE that facilitates the fast, customized delivery of services to enterprises, including their branches, campus, or data center. 

FortiHypervisor is based on the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture, which is a provider-led, standards-based movement that enables the deployment of physical network services as virtualized functions that are decoupled from hardware.  By decoupling software from hardware, NFV achieves key benefits:

• Multiple services can be deployed on the same hardware
• Services are deployed as virtual network functions that are chained together
• Service creation and provisioning are centralized and automated
• New services can be added quickly
• Capex and Opex are both reduced

Organizations around the world, and across all industries are migrating to virtualized network architectures. As a result, the NFV market is expected to experience robust growth of 42% (compound annual growth rate) through 2020, growing from $2.7 Billion in 2015 to $15.5 Billion in 2020.  

FortiHypervisor is a small footprint, consolidated service delivery platform that eliminates the need for multiple dedicated CPE at the customer premises or in the cloud.  Utilizing the KVM hypervisor, it supports a broad array of networking and security virtualized services as virtual network functions (VNFs), both from Fortinet and third parties.  

Figure 1.  FortiHypervisor: new generation of CPE

Unlike any other offering in the market today, FortiHypervisor provides two different approaches for flexible NFV service delivery:  the FortiHypervisor-500D, a hybrid CPE that combines powerful hypervisor-driven software with proven FortiGate hardware and ASIC acceleration, and the FortiHypervisor-ISO, a software instance of virtual CPE that can run on any generic x86 appliance.  This makes FortiHypervisor ideally suited to many different deployment modes and business needs. 

Fortinet’s patented ASIC acceleration built into the hybrid CPE solution delivers both high performance and low latency, which can be crucial for services hosted in the cloud as well as running on-premises.   Fortinet’s next generation Content Processors, CP8 and CP9, deliver up to a ten-fold increase in SSL and VPN traffic acceleration over general purpose processing, with enhanced IPS performance, and no penalty for IPv6 packet forwarding.  All of which adds up to some impressive performance numbers for virtualized security services. 

Figure 2:  Fortinet ASIC acceleration in FortiHypervisor 500D

Fortinet is dedicated to constant innovation.  Today, we have reached another significant milestone in our innovation-based approach by delivering hypervisor-driven technology that enables our service provider and enterprise customers to deliver rapid, cost effective services customized to their business needs.

Visit https://www.fortinet.com/products-services/products/hybrid-virtual-appliance/fortihypervisor.html to learn more about FortiHypervisor and what it can do for your business.