Fortinet and Arista Networks are joining forces to take on the architectures of Cisco and HPE. Together, they offer the Fortinet Secure AI Data Center solution, which delivers a zero-trust architecture with the scalability and validation that competitors also guarantee. However, the big difference with Cisco and HPE is the promise of more freedom of choice and, with that, a best-of-breed policy.
Fortinet already had a Secure AI Data Center solution, but it lacked integration with other vendors. Arista Networks has a good reputation, particularly for hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Meta. A large portion (between 20-35 percent, depending on the quarter) of its revenue also comes from such customers. However, it is not a one-stop shop for networking and security, where a partner such as Fortinet is needed to compete with Cisco or the combined forces of HPE and the acquired Juniper.
What does the new solution offer?
In addition to the claim that Fortinet and Arista jointly deliver the required scale and reliability, Fortinet Secure AI Data Center revolves around its modular nature and performance. For example, HTTPS and TLS are offloaded to Fortinet’s ASIC, with 33 times the performance compared to CPU-driven processing. Those CPUs can therefore focus on their contribution to AI workloads, such as forward passes and token sampling. This keeps network traffic calmer, faster, and less variable (jitter).
Ultimately, solutions such as these are judged on a single metric in AI applications: tokens per second. Although GPUs or TPUs play a crucial role in this, they can never achieve their theoretical speed if the network does not provide them with data in a timely manner. This is where Arista Networks’ low latency comes to the rescue for users, in addition to load balancing for clusters in the world’s largest data centers. Fortinet, in turn, provides the firewalls, threat detection, zero-trust segmentation, encrypted traffic inspections, and automated responses to AI workloads.
Smoothed out
The HPE and Cisco stacks are designed to eliminate friction and provide easy management without compromising security. To offer this across multiple vendors, integration work is clearly needed. Fortinet has understood this for some time and also points out that its own Security Fabric and Open Ecosystem open the doors to other vendors. Although the promise of less lock-in is fairly obvious (other parties can take over the role of Fortinet or Arista Networks), Fortinet does not offer this validated architecture in combination with another networking player. Choosing HPE’s or Cisco’s networking together with Fortinet simply does not come with the same guarantees as this combination. Nor do those parties have any need to allow Fortinet to function as frictionlessly as their own solutions.
The announcement explicitly states that this is not a pre-emptive advantage. Fortinet Secure AI Data Center is intended for the customer base that Arista Networks already serves or targets. Nevertheless, a multi-vendor approach is advantageous for such hyperscale customers. It reduces dependency and allows them to test competitive products.
Read also: HPE and Juniper take aim at Cisco with network fabric