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Life at GÉANT: Sebastiano Buscaglione, Network Engineer

 Life at GÉANT is an initiative to attract new talent: it provides a closer look at the people inside GÉANT’s organisation and what excites them about their working lives. Here’s the latest employee story to give you a flavour of this initiative.

Sebastiano Buscaglione, Network Engineer, Cambridge

‘Inspired by the bigger picture’

Sebastiano, tell us about your work at GÉANT.

I am a member of the Network Engineering team which designs, plans and operates the entire GÉANT network and is responsible for its integrity. This is no modest undertaking considering that the GÉANT network is one of the largest in Europe. In 2016 alone, our network accepted a total of 1.4 Exabyte of data, approximately 1.4billions of Gigabytes; just imagine that it would take more than 5200 years to stream equivalent data in 4K UHD, the highest possible video quality.

The GÉANT network provides connectivity to National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Europe, very high profile national networks providing critical connectivity to universities and research centres. Looking after these major connections is like managing the main motorways in a road system where a limited number of very high capacity roads carry the largest part of a country’s road transport, consequently any fault has an enormous impact.

My work is extremely varied; no two days are the same. A major project I am currently working on focuses on the future evolution of our network; this entails forecasting and capacity planning, as well as actively engaging with the industry to understand and drive the evolution of networking technologies and trends. The objective is to understand the challenges we will face in the next 8 to 10 years and ensure that our network is ready and future-proof.

To read the full story, click here

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