In the geography of data center security, efforts have long focused on protecting north-south traffic — the data that passes between the data center and the rest of the network. But one of the greatest risks has become east-west traffic — network packets passing between servers within a data center.
That’s due to the growth of cloud-native applications built from microservices, whose connections across a data center are changing constantly. With a typical 1,000-server data center having over 1 billion network paths, it’s extremely difficult to write fixed rules that control the blast radius should a malicious actor get inside.
The new NVIDIA Morpheus AI application framework gives security teams complete visibility into security threats by bringing together unmatched AI processing and real-time monitoring on every packet through the data center. It lets them respond to anomalies and update policies immediately as threats are identified.
Combining the security superpowers of AI and NVIDIA BlueField data processing units (DPUs), Morpheus provides cybersecurity developers a highly optimized AI pipeline and pre-trained AI skills that, for the first time, allow them to instantaneously inspect all IP network communication through their data center fabric.
Bringing a new level of security to data centers, the framework provides dynamic protection, monitoring, adaptive policies and cyber defenses required to detect and remediate them.
Continuous AI Analytics on Network Traffic
Morpheus — which combines event streaming from NVIDIA Cumulus NetQ and GPU accelerated computing with RAPIDS data analytics pipelines, deep learning frameworks and Triton Inference Server, runs on mainstream NVIDIA-Certified enterprise servers — simplifies the analysis of computer logs and helps detect and mitigate security threats. Pre-trained AI models help find leaked credentials, keys, passwords, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and identify security policies that need to be hardened.
Integrating the framework into a third-party cybersecurity offering brings the world’s best AI computing to communication networks. Morpheus can receive rich telemetry feeds from every NVIDIA BlueField DPU-accelerated server in the data center without impacting server performance. BlueField-2 DPUs act both as a sensor to collect real-time packet flows and as a policy enforcement point to limit communication between any microservice container or virtual machine in a data center.
By placing BlueField-2 DPUs in servers across the data center, Morpheus can automatically write and change policies to immediately remediate security threats — from changing the logs being collected and altering the volume of ingesting, to dynamically redirecting certain log events, blocking traffic newly identified as malicious, rewriting rules to enforce policy updates, and more.
Accelerate and Secure the Data Center with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs
The NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU, available today, enables true software-defined, hardware-accelerated data center infrastructure. By having software-defined networking policies and telemetry collection run on the BlueField DPU before entering the server, the DPU offloads, accelerates, and isolates critical data center functions without burdening the server’s CPU. The DPU also extends the simple static security logging model and implements sophisticated dynamic telemetry that evolves with new policies being determined and adjusted.
Learn more about NVIDIA Morpheus and apply for early access, currently available in the U.S. and Israel.
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