DANTE's Planning and Development

DANTE's Planning and Development are handled by:

DANTE's Chief Technical Officer 
Roberto Sabatino

Planning

Planning Manager
Michael Enrico

The Planning team
Guy Roberts
Nicolas Simar

Systems

Head of Systems
Anand Patil

The Systems team
Anton Antonov
Loukik Kudarimoti
Maurizio Molina
Mandeep Saini
Waldemar Zurowski

Chief Technical Officer

Roberto Sabatino

Roberto joined DANTE in July 1997 as a Network Engineer. In November 1998 he was promoted to Head of Network Planning and became Chief Technical Officer in August 2002. Roberto has a degree in Computer Science (Italian Laurea) from the University of Turin and prior to joining DANTE he worked for two years at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as a Research Associate, from April 1995 to May 1997. From January 1984 until April 1995 he worked in Italy in the telecommunications industry and at the University of Turin.

Planning

Michael Enrico
Planning Manager

Michael Enrico received his BSc and PhD degrees in physics from Lancaster University in 1991 and 1995. His PhD work involved experimental studies on superfluid helium at ultralow temperatures. After a couple of years working as a research associate, he took a change in career direction and moved into telecommunications. In 1997 he joined what is now BTexact Technologies, working mainly on the study and development of innovative broadband access network architectures based on hybrid fibre-copper infrastructures. He then moved onto working on BT's wholesale broadband platform, focusing on the shorter term requirements of highly scalable IP network transport solution designs.

In 2000, he joined a telecommunications startup as a network architect, where he had responsibility for designing a novel platform capable of supporting wholesale secure broadband access and VPN services with a pan-European footprint.

In December 2001, Michael joined the Network Engineering and Planning team in DANTE, where he now works on projects concerned with the future of pan-European research and education networking. These include studies on the introduction of advanced optical networking technologies, expansion of the current GÉANT service to countries around the Mediterranean through EUMEDCONNECT (part of the EU-funded EUMEDIS programme) and improved support for emerging projects using applications with high network demands (e.g. GRIDS).

In May 2003 Michael was promoted to Network Planning Manager.

Guy Roberts

Guy Roberts received his BEng degree from RMIT University in Australia in 1991 and his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2006.  His PhD research into semiconductor optical amplifier based optical switching for computer interconnect applications was conducted in collaboration with Intel Research Cambridge.  He has wide ranging commercial experience in the telecommunications sector beginning in Australia in Telstra’s SDH transmission project group where he was involved in introducing SDH technology into their network.  In 1995 he moved to Fujitsu Australia where in his product architecture role he contributed to the development of Fujitsu’s multiservice access platform FSX2000. In 1999 Guy relocated to the UK to work for Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe where he was their key technical consultant for system integration and testing of Fujitsu’s DSL platform the FDX.

In July 2006 Guy joined the Network Engineering and Planning team in DANTE, where he now works on projects concerned with the future of pan-European research and education networking.  One of his current interests is the “Bandwidth on Demand” research project which is aimed at investigating and developing an end-to-end (and therefore multi-domain) bandwidth allocation and reservation service.

Nicolas Simar

Nicolas Simar graduated as a Computer Science Engineer (Ingénieur Civil Informaticien) from the University of Liège (Belgium) in September 2000. He did his dissertation on IP QoS in the Networking Research Unit (Professor Guy Leduc) in collaboration with Cisco Systems (Eric Vyncke).

Nicolas joined DANTE in October 2000. He was an active member of the SEQUIN project defining and studying the deployment of the Premium IP service on a multi-domain environment. He is involved in the deployment of the Premium IP and Less than Best Effort IP QoS service on GÉANT. One of his current interests is the deployment of a multi-domain performance monitoring infrastructure (delay, jitter and packet loss monitoring).

 

Systems Team

Anand Patil
Head of Systems

Anand graduated with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from India in 1994. He started his career as a software engineer with Infosys in Bangalore. In 1996 he moved to Singapore and worked with NCS, a Singapore Telecom subsidiary, as a senior consultant. He has worked as a Systems Architect in the field of bespoke application development in a wide range of business sectors and technologies.

Anand came to the UK to pursue an MSc degree in Distributed Systems and Networks from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2002. As a part of the Masters course he did a summer project at DANTE developing a Premium IP reservation system. After completing his thesis Anand decided to join DANTE in the Network Planning and Engineering group to continue his work with Premium IP services. Anand brings his application development experience to the networking field and is currently working with premium IP, performance monitoring and various network monitoring tools.

Anton Antonov

Anton joined DANTE in December 2000 as a Systems administrator. He is responsible for the installation, configuration and maintenance of the Windows NT and UNIX servers and clients at DANTE and in the GÉANT PoPs. This also includes technical support for the Internet Services (firewalls, email, web, ftp servers etc.) provided by DANTE.

Anton received his MSc degree in Computer Systems and Networks from Southern Ural State University in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 1994. In 1994-1995 he worked for the LOGIS Company and took part in projects for planning and building LANs.

In 1995 he went to Bank Snezhinskiy as a Network Engineer. He was at Snezhinskiy for 5 years working with UNIX and Novell Netware servers, Cisco routers, LAN and WAN projects.

Loukik Kudarimoti

Loukik Kudarimoti graduated as a Computer Science Engineer from Visveswaraiah Technological University (JSSATE, Bangalore, India) in July, 2002. He did his Master's course in Distributed Systems and Networks at the University of Kent. As a part of his course, Loukik worked on 'Multi-Domain Performance Monitoring' at DANTE for four months.

After completing his MSc course in September 2003, Loukik became a full-time member of the Network Engineering and Planning team at DANTE. He continues to work on Performance Monitoring projects and also other monitoring tools.

Maurizio Molina

Maurizio Molina graduated in Electronic Engineering (Italian Laurea) from the Polytechnic of Turin in 1993. Since then, he has worked in the telecommunications industry, mainly in research centres, including Telecom Italia Labs (Turin, Italy) and the NEC Network Laboratories (Heidelberg, Germany). He published several papers about IP and ATM traffic modelling and network measurements. He contributed to the ITU-T ATM standardisation process, and to working groups in the IETF (on IPFIX and PSAMP). He joined DANTE's Systems group in November 2004, working on performance monitoring, security and authentication.

Mandeep Saini

Mandeep graduated in June 2003 from Kurukshetra University, India with a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering. She has worked as a lecturer in the Computer Engineering Department of Haryana Engineering College, India and has also gained experience at GNIX Infosoft, India while working on Human Resource Management Tracking System project as well as at EXL Services as a Technical Executive.

Mandeep completed her Masters in Distributed Systems and Networks from the University of Kent in 2006. As a part of the degree, she undertook a four-month project for DANTE covering 'Multi-layered Network Weather Map using AJAX Technology', before joining the Systems team in November 2006. 

Waldemar Zurowski

Waldemar Zurowski graduated in July 1998 with an MSc in Computer Science from Wroclaw University of Technology. Until 2002, he worked for WCSS (the Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing) and subsequently as a programmer and systems administrator. His general interests include network operating systems.