The Cradle Network - Overview

The Cradle architecture is designed to "Worlds Best Practice". In particular, we use what is referred to as, a "Three Tier Network Architecture" . This simply means that we break our network up into different physical segments to provide additional levels of security and redundancy. A "layer" is an independent segment of the overall network.

These tiers are easily understood if you think of them as:

A classic three-tier model is commonly broken down into cache, load balancing and web servers, application servers, and database servers. Each of the three tiers has its own specific needs and may require a different solution to achieve those needs. Cradle have introduced additional layers, where we need to manage further parts of the network which influence your service.

We treat the Internet itself as a "layer" in our network, and we refer to that as Layer 0 ( Zero ) albeit that we don’t control the Internet as a whole, in that we certainly do have control over the parts of it we connect to. We also have a independent segment called "Layer 1" which is our Core Network Fabric where key elements such as Internet Firewalls, Intrusion Detection, Bandwidth Accounting, Load Balancing, Content Caches and such live.

We also include a further segment, which we call "Layer 5". This is where any "back end" communications or connectivity is provided. Layer 5 actually "extends" out to the customer premises, i.e. the customer end of any back end communications connectivity where we provide device or service management such as on site routers, firewalls, and switches. Again as with Layer 0 we include layers 4 and 5 in our over all architecture as they are parts of our network we manage and hence influence.

An overall view of our network architecture includes in total, the following architecture:

Tier	Details
1	Network Core Layer
2	Web Layer
3	Application Layer
4	Database Layer
5	Backend Communications Layer

Each of these layers is made up of physically independent Switched Fabric in the form of "high end" network switching equipment, as well as being secured by a physically independent Firewalls at every layer. By providing you with not only the standard three-tier model, but the complete the six-tier Cradle Technologies "Secure Managed Hosting" architecture as well, we enable you to build the most cost effective and efficient environment while maximizing your entire infrastructure’s performance, security and scalability.

The Cradle network - Design

The following design diagram provides a high level network schematic of our Secure Managed Hosting Multi Tier network architecture (with example customer servers shown):