Intel subsidiary Wind River has added to its NFV portfolio with the announcement of a new product which focuses on the virtualization of customer premises equipment (vCPE). The vendor claims it has strengthened its VNF offering to bring initiatives like vCPE management closer to reality.

Wind River’s new Titanium Server CPE software adds to the vendor’s existing NFV portfolio. vCPE is one of the primary NFV use cases mooted by the telecoms industry; the improvements to Wind River’s software could mean all functions traditionally configured on each piece of hardware at the customer’s premises can now be handled centrally and instantly replicated across the cloud.

According to Wind River, the improvements to the Titanium Server portfolio (Titanium Server and Titanium Server CPE) will create faster network performance, allow networks to ramp up in size instantly and simplify the commissioning of new additions to any network. The vendor also claims the Titanium Server portfolio’s new software stands up to the carrier grade needed for telecom networks.

The cost of administering moves and changes, which is often time consuming and labour intensive, is one of the areas that telcos view as ripe for efficiency improvements. However, the virtualization of CPE functions has proved a challenging ambition to fulfil. The replacement of a system which individually configures each physical appliance (such as a switch or handset) with a centrally managed one could slash operating expenditure (OPEX). The savings would come by substituting the work of multiple physical configurations, requiring a site visit, with a single software change that can be published to all devices on all points of the telecoms cloud, using the new Titanium Server CPE platform, according to Wind River.

Among the new features added to Titanium Server are dynamic CPU scaling, greater system scalability, a virtual switch packet trace tool and the capacity for bulk provisioning and automated deployment. The new release also now supports QinQ tunnelling, IPv6 support for all interfaces and has updated support for all the latest high-performance network interface cards (NICs). It also supports VNF access to hardware acceleration devices, such as the Intel Communications Chipset 8925 to 8955 Series.

The new incarnation of Titanium Server CPE launch follows collaboration with NFV software partners Brocade, Check Point, InfoVista and Riverbed.

Titanium Server and Titanium Server CPE will be showcased at Mobile World Congress 2016.