"I will no longer need one kind of multipathing software for my HDS box and another kind for my EMC array," says Christian. "I'll only need one brand of multipathing software that will be able to function across several different arrays."

While vendors want to hurry the world onto their new intelligent gear, the bottom line is that the Really Intelligent Switch still lies in the future.

"Intelligence has been just over the horizon for quite some time and has yet to make a big splash," says Mike Karp, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. "There will also be a delay in market uptake, since these things are serious investments."

AOL's Pollack doesn't plan to get into virtualization and other application intelligence functions until he has gained more confidence on the transportation side.

Norfolk Southern, on the other hand, doesn't even plan to deploy SAN routing until the end of the year. Says Christian, "That gives us another year for the technology to mature."