"Funny thing is, those are the exact words I use when talking to people about networking"
Computer networking is not the same. Our networks will not explode. I will grant you that they can be shite if not designed properly but they end up running slowly or not at all, but it will not combust nor explode.
If you get the basics right for ethernet then it works rather well as a massive network. You could describe it as an internetwork.
Basically, keep your layer 1 to around 200 odd maximum devices per VLAN - that works fine for IPv4. You might have to tune MAC tables for IPv6 for obvious reasons.
Your fancier switches will have some funky memory for tables of one address to other address translation eg MAC to IP n VLAN and that. That memory will be shared with other databases too, perhaps iSCSI, so you have to decide how to manage that lot.
You tried to nerdsnipe someone without mentioning L2 is effectively dead within datacenters since VXLAN became hardware accelerated in both Broadcom and "NVIDIA"(Mellanox) gear. And for those that don't need/care about L2 they don't even bother and run L3 all the way.
EVPN uses BGP to advertise MAC addresses in VXLAN networks which solves looping without magic packets, scales better and is easier to introspect.
And we didn't even get into the provider side which has been using MPLS for decades.
A problem with high bandwidth networking over fiber is that since light refracts within the fiber some light will take a longer path than other, if the widow is too short and you have too much scattering you will drop packets.
So hopefully someone doesn't bend your 100G fiber too much, if that isn't finicky idk what is, DAC cables with twinax solve it short-range for cheaper however.
Computer networking is not the same. Our networks will not explode. I will grant you that they can be shite if not designed properly but they end up running slowly or not at all, but it will not combust nor explode.
If you get the basics right for ethernet then it works rather well as a massive network. You could describe it as an internetwork.
Basically, keep your layer 1 to around 200 odd maximum devices per VLAN - that works fine for IPv4. You might have to tune MAC tables for IPv6 for obvious reasons.
Your fancier switches will have some funky memory for tables of one address to other address translation eg MAC to IP n VLAN and that. That memory will be shared with other databases too, perhaps iSCSI, so you have to decide how to manage that lot.