Load balancing does not strictly provide anything but the balancing of "loads" across multiple paths. The fact that software packages that provide load balancing algorithms may also provide redundancy, error correction, clustering or failover is irrelevant.

Load balancing is simply the process of applying an algorithm such that the "load" for a certain resource, which can be described as "the hoops through which the system must jump" to provide that resource, is balanced evenly.

Take the simple example of a request made to a disk for which two paths are available. Each path to the same disk originates at a different SCSI controller. If the load on the first controller is high, or there are several requests backed up on that particular path, load balancing would queue the request for the same disk on the second controller.

In this scenario we have a redundant path to the device. The redundancy is not provided by the load balancing algorithm, but rather the sensible design of the system iteslf. Seperate software would be needed to take advantage of the redundant path and often this is bundled with software that does load balancing. The two are not the same.