And since Jawbreaker was largely based on merchant silicon and likely less expensive to make, it was just as inexpensive -- for Cisco, anyway -- to kill it. Marketing mockups are usually one and done projects.

"If they will deliver this at this point or use this technology as the basis for what Mario and Co. are doing is not clear," the SDN source says.

"Cisco can afford to have multiple projects that overlap and not necessarily bring all of them to market," a fabric source says.

in Network World's Data Center section.