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There are systems like this: Fibre Channel has it's own data link layer, actually they do reliability at the data link layer! I think InfiniBand is similar to this respect.

Actually it's interesting that google didn't choose any of these, for their high bandwidth storage needs. They have the money to do their own thing, but why should they?

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Infiniband and most other specialized protocols have data-link-layer reliable messaging. The downside of this is that a congested switch cannot drop packets, so you end up backpressuring your network to death unless the people writing software really know what they're doing. Google was not able to make this work at scale.

Google migrated away from IB years ago. IIUC, the failure modes at the time (e.g., fully locked up fabric) were too painful at the time, and they preferred to work with a mostly vanilla Linux kernel for userspace networking.

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