Hardware alternative to load balancing a network?

We're currently looking at load-balancing our network, but I was wondering if there are any alternatives to load balancing (through Win2k AS), such as having a single hardware device with an IP address that routes traffic based on certain rules. Does such a thing exist? Is there anything out there I can check out?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000...luster/nlb.asp

Not sure if thats what your looking for, but you can use Windows Server 2000 to load balance a network.

see alteon or intel for jw load balancers - quality goods but a tad complicated to set up.

Thanks, that was a big help. I finally managed to find the Cisco LocalDirector 400 Series, which seems to fit the bill of what we're looking for. The Intel products, however, have been discontinued (they were actually legacy iPivot products).

Anyone know of any others?

Ok, forget my previous question about hardware, we're going to go with W2K Advanced Server capabilities. Let me pose another though: how do you handle load balancing through W2K AS when you have various different servers with different capacities? From what I understand, it works well when you have identical servers that handle equal loads, but can it be used with servers that are not identical? Does the load balancing function know that one server can handle a greater capacity than the other, and thus factor that in to balancing network traffic?