Cisco has never publicly acknowledged the existence of the Jawbreaker project, which came to light 13 months ago, so information from sources couldn't be confirmed. A year ago, sources said Jawbreaker was based on Broadcom's Trident+ chipset and had two components: a fabric core with 40G interfaces and a 48-port 10G switch with 40G uplinks. It was to ship later this year, sources said at the time.

It still might. But now that Cisco's rolled out 40G Ethernet modules for the and perhaps some uplinks soon for the , as well as extending Nexus Fabric Extenders, it at least appears that Nexus and are fairly well along in the fabric investment and development cycle.

As a result, Jawbreaker has been retargeted toward the enterprise, some fabric sources believe. Its application there could be a higher-speed, lower-latency campuswide fabric as an adjunct or upgrade to the Catalyst installed base.

"It's being done by the Catalyst group," one fabric source said. "It may be refocused on campus only. But as a data center fabric, the rumor mill seems to be losing some steam."

Another option for Jawbreaker could be as a switch/controller for , especially now that rival HP is focusing OpenFlow on the enterprise with the . OpenFlow/SDN control of merchant silicon-based hardware is said to be a threat to Cisco's custom ASIC/tightly coupled software-based switch dominance in enterprises.