IBM's WebSphere Performance Pack is more traditional - software is centralized and simply loaded onto a hardware platform that becomes the site scheduler. All traffic passes through the single scheduler and is distributed to the content servers. Resonate's Central Dispatch software partitions the scheduler function between a central scheduler and the content servers. This off-loads some functions from the scheduler, which improves performance. Central Dispatch also lets you turn on as many schedulers on as many servers as you need to meet site performance requirements.
Some vendors choose to prepackage their load balancing products in dedicated hardware devices.
This allows the manufacturer to select peripherals and drivers, memory speeds and sizes, and operating system parameters tailored for each customer's performance and capacity needs. To date, the preloaded device approach has been the simplest and fastest way to get new features to market. The hardware engineering effort required is small, and vendors can focus on software development. Unlike pure software vendors, dedicated hardware vendors don't have to support their products on many different operating systems. Many of the early load-balancing vendors, such as Cisco, F5 Networks and RadWare, have chosen the dedicated device path.