Huawei
I'm the "just another" guy in the first post.
I mentioned Huawei because I've spoken to them most recently. The figures I have onhand are about £15k list for a 48port 10GbE TRILL switch and a coment from the sales guys that "we usually sell at about 30% of list price. That will have to rise eventually of course" - which works out at about 105 quid per port.
As mentioned previously, that's with full IP services.
A Cisco 3750X-48 with everything enabled costs more than that even with "fantastic 85% discount"(*), let alone similar Cisco 10GbE kit, for which I'm being quoted £30-35k with discounts
(*) Yet a Cisco SGE-500 which has apparently better specs is £1000. Go figure. They handle multicast better too.
Of course there are other players in the market. I only started looking seriously for 10GbE kit late in 2012 after getting committments to the spend - it's as much for crosscampus connectivity as for server rooms which is why TRILL is important to me. Serverside you can only LACP bundle up so many 1Gb/s links(**) and they don't work anywhere near as well as a single higher bandwidth connection.(***)
(**) 8 per bond group on most switches and they're effectively running at max capacity on our servers.
(***) The best you can usually achieve is 1Gb/s per client-server pair. That isn't fast enough when handling terabytes of imaging.
Machine-side, 10GbE cards aren't particularly expensive when compared to multiport GbE NICs, nor when compared to FC HBAs
10GbE isn't needed for small deployments. I'm using GbE at home but only because cheap unmanged 5-8 port switches are less than a tenner these days. It makes a difference when streaming HD stuff from the media server but how many domestic setups have one of those?
If you need managed GbE, then budget 100-150 quid for 16-24 ports and even the cheapest/nastiest switch is virtually impossible to saturate unless everything is broadcasting. GbE is commodity these days. 500 quid gets you a 48-port Cisco/Linksys SGE300 which is a pretty respectable box with a CLI interface. 200 more gets a SGE500 which is stackable (other makers are available, of course)
Yes, 10GbE doesn't go far on copper, but 10-20 metres on CAT5 is enough for racktop and 45 on cat6 is enough for server rooms. Desktop endpoints seldom need more than 1Gb/s. Anything needing faster than that tends to be too hot/noisy for an office environment.