Sana Bellamine

Sana Bellamine

Posted on: 24 Jul, 2018

Sana’s professional network engineering career started in Tunisia, with the “Institut de Recherches et des Sciences Informatiques de Tunisie” ( IRSIT ) and with “l’ Agence Tunisienne Internet” ( ATI ). She was one of the members of the Engineering team responsible for connecting Tunisia and institutions within Tunisia to the Internet ( “.TN” top level domain ) . While in Tunisia, Sana joined the Internet Society ( ISOC ) and collaborated with the Network Startup Resource Center ( NSRC ) group on setting and on teaching multiple international IP routing workshops. 

After her experience in Tunisia, Sana moved to the US and joined Epoch Internet , the largest privately held service provider at the time. While at Epoch, Sana lead the backbone engineering team and was the primary point of contact for negotiating and turning up private and public peering with Level3, UUNET, Sprint, AT&T and additional tier1 and tier2 providers.

In 2009, Sana joined CENIC, the primary service provider for educational and research institutions in California. Within the core network engineering team at CENIC, she first worked on upgrading the connectivity for CENIC associates ( UCs, CSUs, Community colleges )  from 1GE to 10GE and on implementing high availability routing solutions. She then distinguished herself by developing a strong understanding of optical networking and IP over DWDM, and took over the optical design role for CENIC, which previously relied heavily on consultation with Cisco optical engineers. Sana was primarily responsible for engineering decisions related to optical equipment for the 100 Gbps CalREN backbone upgrade and for the 100GE optical upgrades for CENIC associates, including the Pacific Research Platform ( PRP )  participants.

In addition to her optical engineering responsibilities, Sana is one of CENIC’s lead engineers responsible for operating the PacificWave Internet Exchange backbone and contributed to upgrading the Pacific wave backbone infrastructure to Nx100Gbps. In this role, Sana developed performance troubleshooting skills using ESnet’s PerfSonar toolSuite.

Sana was recognized nationally in 2016 when she was selected to participate in a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration called “Women in IT Networking at SC,” or WINS, a program dedicated to providing professional development opportunities to highly-qualified women in the field of networking. At SuperComputing 2016, she was one of the members of the SCInet Wide Area Network ( WAN ) team and worked on bringing 1 Tbps of capacity from the CENIC and Pacwave backbones to the SuperComputing show floor.

In March 2018, Sana presented CENIC’s upgrade path beyond 200GE at Cisco’s Packet Optical networking conference ( PONC2018 ).  

Sana is also a member of CENIC’s Secteam and has recently designed and implemented a routing solution in support of a cloud based DDOS detection/mitigation service. 

Sana holds a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.