And this was a shallow dive. The goal was not to spend countless hours on each solution; I simply wanted to get a high level overview. The focus was just to try and get the following questions answered.
Who has fixed configuration switches with 40GbE interfaces? Do they support “standard” L2/L3 protocols? Do they support some type of Layer 2 multipathing? Is there support for a type of MLAG? What is the port to port latency? What is the power consumption? Is there anything “special” about the switch, or is it unique in anyway?
After a few seconds of thinking about it, I decided to focus on Arista, Dell Force10, Extreme, IBM, Juniper, Brocade, HP, and of course, Cisco.