Mellanox & Guardicore deliver agentless micro-segmentation for high-speed networks

Mellanox Technologies and Guardicore promise to deliver agentless low latency micro segmentation designed for high-speed 10G-100G networks.

The two companies will leverage Guardicore's security expertise that lies in the Guardicore Centra security platform, as well the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC solutions. These fully integrated technologies will allow customer to support micro segmentation.

Guardicore's CEO and cofounder Pavel Gurvich says that data centers are experiencing high demand for data, and they need to match the scale, speed and security necessary to support digitally-driven businesses.

 "We have long been committed to applying micro-segmentation techniques to help enterprise security teams cost-effectively reduce risk and limit the attack surface inside the data center without impacting performance," says Gurvich.

"Partnering with Mellanox to offer an integrated solution is a natural extension of the many use cases we already support and allows us to address another set of specific customer requirements to protect data in high-speed, complex environments.

The Guardicore and Mellanox joint solution allows organisations to gain visibility and protect workloads in high speed networks, often when it is not usually practical to use agents across their infrastructures.

The solution runs on the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC, which is considered a computer on its own.

It uses hardware offload to support high-speed and low-latency requirements.

Additionally, running the Guardicore solution integrated on BlueField delivers enforcement performance - allowing or blocking traffic at wire speed and without any impact to server performance.

"The first agentless and high-performance micro-segmentation solution in the IT security industry, the combination of Guardicore Centra and BlueField enables ease of deployment and operations in both new and existing environments," says Mellanox VP Cyber Security, Ariel Levanon.

"The combined Guardicore and Mellanox solution enables enhanced visibility and policy enforcement without installing agents on compute nodes. Agents are integrated into the BlueField SmartNIC in a manner fully isolated from the application workload, while also complying with strict regulations and embracing DevOps automation.'

"As a high-speed SmartNIC, BlueField delivers unmatched performance that enforces micro-segmentation policies in 100Gb/s networks at full wire speed.

BlueField is positioned for bare-metal and Kubernetes deployments; running agents on the SmartNIC removes the need to deploy and maintain agents in these environments, enabling enterprise DevOps automation.

Organisations are able to deploy the solution on every workload in any environment and at any scale.

It also supports deployment options such as:

• Agentless with BlueField SmartNIC – fully isolated from the host
• Hybrid –agent running on the compute node while taking advantage of the BlueField SmartNIC for hardware acceleration
• Native – the agent runs directly on the compute node on the host operating-system or in a guest VM/container, which is the traditional type of deployment for microservices.

The joint Guardicore-Mellanox solution is available immediately from both vendors' network of value added resellers.