Sophos XG Firewall has been verified by Nutanix to join their ecosystem and provide network security for Nutanix virtualized environments. This expands XG Firewall’s already industry-leading deployment options including hardware, AWS and Azure public cloud, and all major virtualization platforms.
Nutanix and Hyperconvergence:
Nutanix is the industry leader in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
One of the challenges with managing a traditional data center is the different silos or solutions for compute, storage, virtualization, and networking. These are complex to manage and maintain and don’t scale easily.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the elements of a traditional data center: storage, compute, networking, and management. This integrated solution uses software, virtualization and x86 servers to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware. Hyperconvergence makes the underlying datacenter and cloud infrastructure invisible, abstracting and elevating it. The result is added simplicity and scalability.
Nutanix offers a suite of products to enable HCI. Their AHV virtualization hypervisor encapsulates a customer’s private and public cloud infrastructure. In addition, Nutanix offers Flow, their software defined network policy engine that is built into AHV to provide easy and granular policy-driven network and application segmentation.
XG Firewall and Nutanix:
XG Firewall has been verified by Nutanix as AHV and Nutanix Flow ready. XG Firewall can now be deployed in Nutanix virtualized environments to provide protection for networked applications and traffic. XG Firewall v18 with the new Xstream Architecture running on Nutanix AHV provides deeper visibility into applications, network activity, and threats – able to stop even previously unseen attacks that might be attempting to penetrate the virtual datacenter environment.
XG Firewall has been validated to provide two modes of operation within Nutanix AHV infrastructure (illustrated below):
- XG firewall can provide standard NGFW protection on Nutanix AHV similar to any other physical, virtual, cloud, or hybrid network.
- In addition, non-IP bridge mode in XG can be used within the network as part of Nutanix Flow’s micro-segmentation to transparently redirect VM traffic through a virtual XG Firewall running in bridge mode on every AHV host to protect east-west traffic.
XG Firewall can protect traffic entering and leaving the Nutanix AHV infrastructure while also securing traffic moving within the Nutanix Flow software defined network taking advantage of the granular redirection capabilities of Nutanix Flow micro-segmentation that ensures security protection policies are optimized for individual applications.
XG Firewall’s full suite of protection capabilities will help secure Nutanix applications and network traffic flows including TLS inspection, intrusion prevention, application control, web protection and filtering and zero-day threat protection with sandboxing and threat intelligence.
XG Firewall now fits more customer networking needs than ever and now Nutanix customers can take advantage of XG Firewall’s leading visibility, protection and response as well.
Nutanix customers can get started by taking advantage of a free 30-day trial of XG Firewall using our Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) image which is validated as Nutanix AHV ready.
