Cloudify and Fortinet Deliver NFV Orchestration via New Technical Partnership

Cloudify and Fortinet have established a technology partnership to address the challenges of network functions virtualization (NFV) in order to help organizations quickly, effectively and securely provision and deploy new network services across hybrid environments-brownfield and greenfield-at a fraction of the time and risk.

Cloudify makes open source software used by large telecoms, Tier 1 network operators and large enterprises for cloud infrastructure, applications and NFV automation and management. Fortinet’s award-winning FortiGate network security platform provides end-to-end security across the entire network.

The NFV reality of decoupling network functions from the underlying hardware on which they run is now here. With NFV, many physical network functions-like load balancers and firewalls-are becoming virtualized network functions (VNFs) that are shipped and delivered via software. Because VNFs are deployed only when needed, NFV can substantially improve network cost efficiency, responsiveness and security.

NFV also introduces new challenges to the network specifically related to effective management of VNFs in a world with no de facto standard for VNF onboarding. Addressing these challenges requires dynamic services and orchestration where both the NFV platform and the VNFs themselves must come with management and orchestration (MANO), as well as fault tolerance for post-deployment operations.

In partnership, Cloudify and Fortinet developed a tested and validated solution that solves this problem, combining the Fortinet FortiGate virtualized appliance product with Cloudify Manager software to enable management and orchestration on any virtualized environment, along with Day 2 operations, and additional dynamic services required from today’s cloud environments.

"The award-winning Fortinet FortiGate network security platform integrates into the Cloudify TOSCA orchestration platform to provide comprehensive security protection, with standards-based interoperability critical to service provider transformation," said Warren Wu, senior director of product marketing, Cloud & Service Provider Solutions at Fortinet. "FortiGate firewalls offer protection from a broad array of threats, with support for all of the security and networking services offered by the FortiOS operating system."

"With the new solution, network operators get a single platform that manages both the NFV environment and the individual VNFs with a common modeling language based on widely accepted TOSCA standards embraced by the telecom industry," said Amir Levy, director, technical market development, Office of the CTO, Cloudify. "FortiGate provides high performance, layered security services and granular visibility for end-to-end protection across the entire network deployment."

Solution Benefits

• VNF management and NFV orchestration supported by Cloudify Manager, a single platform based on the industry-proven TOSCA standard.
• Comprehensive security managed through a single dashboard.
• Validated security protection from FortiGate to protect against sophisticated cyber-threats, with built-in multi-cloud, scale, and heal workflow support.