Mark- overall good writeup. Wanted to add some clarity on a few things that could end up becoming healthy discussion points in and of themselves, but I guess that's why we use this medium - it's great for getting feedback from a broad cross-section.

1) I am surprised that you did not mention the Catalyst 6500 series. Not only is the Catalyst 6500 scaling upwards to 80Gb/slot in the future but it has the services such as firewalling, security, application networking that are necessary in many networks. The Catalyst 6500 also does have MPLS support in hardware, and has for many years so it is a mature feature set.

2) I agree that FCoE is on the near-term horizon, most likely with first products entering into the market in the second half of this calendar year and seeing generally availably kit and deployments scaling throughout 2009. One point I did want to raise is that while we are currently not planning on shipping native FibreChannel in the Nexus 7000 series the Nexus family is capable of supporting native FibreChannel and in fact uses some of the same arbitration and fabric technologies on the backplane which is in part how it achieves the levels of resiliency that it does.

3) I am surprised at the positioning of what looks to be a campus switch in the data center. This is an area where security, airflow, environmentals, remote management, cable management, etc are all first-order decision making criteria; compound that with requirements for uptime in a virtualized world where change-control windows are non-existent and the zero-service disruption upgrades become the only way I can imagine to ensure service availability. These should become baseline requirements for platforms in the data center. Server, Network, and Storage platforms for that matter....

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me.

dg