And though Jawbreaker is said to be based on merchant silicon, there's a component sources say wasn't: the fabric core, which one SDN source called a "parent" switch. The parent was to be a typical Cisco development of a platform based on custom ASICs tightly coupled with the switch software.

This Jawbreaker parent was under the purview of Cisco engineers and until both jumped over to Insieme, the distributed data storage/OpenStack/SDN(?) startup , the SDN source says. Now the Jawbreaker parent may be at Insieme because its parents are.

"There are two pieces to this strategy," the SDN source says. "The first was getting a merchant silicon based platform out the door based on Trident+ from Broadcom. The second was a 'parent' switch. This second piece is exactly what Tom and Dinesh were working on at Cisco before they left."

Edsall and Dutt's involvement with Insieme could not be confirmed. But another fabric source says the engineers could have left Jawbreaker behind if they jumped to Insieme.

This source says he believes Jawbreaker has been canceled entirely since QFabric, its market quarry, has been hobbled by a purported slow ramp in sales. Juniper says .