Wind River has extended its Titanium platform of server software to target virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE), betting on that use case to be an early star of network functions virtualization (NFV).

The company announced Titanium Server CPE today hand-in-hand with a new release of Titanium Server. The latter includes features such as dynamic CPU scaling and a packet-trace tool for virtual switches.

Wind River, acquired by Intel in 2009, originally made its name selling real-time operating systems for embedded semiconductors. Titanium Server is Wind River's entrée into networking, marketed as a carrier-grade alternative to commodity server software.

Wind River is particularly interested in the case of the enterprise vCPE. In December, the company released a reference design — a "vBCPE," where "B" stands for "business" — in collaboration with Brocade, Check Point, InfoVista, and Riverbed. The idea was to verify that the partners' virtual network functions (VNFs), including the Brocade 5600 virtual router, could run properly and in harmony on Titanium Server.