Tia Zanella

Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by signals especially phones. I still remember dismantling my grandma’s gpo 746. It shocked her, but for me it was pure curiosity: understanding how those things actually was working and how you could dial without using the rotary wheel. That led me to mess with the dial contacts and discover that it was possible to dial by tapping the hook switch multiple times one tap per number. Later came my mother’s startac, the first satellite decoder at my parents house and a poor CB radio found abandoned in trash and restored, each one were expanding my obsession with how information was travelling. At 13 I mounted a satellite dish on my grandpa’s roof just to experiment with signals after watching my favorite ever movie, "Alien" but I ended up with zero E.T. contacts from the ufology space center builded in my bedroom. After a while the PlayStation helped me refocus my interests and I ended up connecting two Sony Trinitron KV-14V5U to play with transmission signals what we’d call streaming today but ended wrong when I overwrite a rented blockbuster VHS and had to explain later why 'to live and die in l.a' was over 'mortal kombat' my excuses with a big smile was 'uhm label issues you know', unfortunately wasn't believed. Then at 16 I received as a gift my first pc with a 56k modem and my search travel allowed me to land on SETI@home (and later years on BOINC) introducing me to distributed computing. That curiosity pulled me deep into open source systems landing on Debian. Between 16 and 18 I ran my first web page from my home PC named cobra501 (yes, from the Stallone movie and no, I don’t remember why 501). My life today still runs on that curiosity: trying, failing, learning, sharing, repeating. I’m an open-minded builder deep focused on open source, network engineering, software development, high-performance hybrid architectures and automation. For me, learning is just by doing, questioning everything I don’t yet understand and sharing, because I believe this enable people to evolve together.

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2025

Nestlé | Senior Solution Architect Data Center and Cloud Network

Joining Nestlé, I embarked on a new adventure that marked a fresh start in my life an immense opportunity to learn and grow, and a true honor to be part of the world’s most iconic food brand and contribute to its journey.
2022

Copan | Senior Systems Architect Manager

In this role, I managed a team of 20 people, 13 based at headquarters, with the rest distributed across AMER, LATAM, and APAC. I was responsible for the headquarter Tier III Data Center design and managing its construction from ground up, promoting the adoption of certified refurbished hardware that dramatically reduced the Data Center costs while keep infusing an Open Source culture across IT and company projects including the adoption of Arista Networks, Proxmox, Ceph, RHEL, Ubuntu, GitLab, Zabbix and Grafana. My projects were completed with the design of the headquarter NOCC (Network Operation Command Center) for which I managed from ground up it's construction featuring a stunning NEC Videowall of 12 Displays for which I developed specific Zabbix Templates including for the OT network to get an holistic end-to-end visibility through multiple Grafana dashboards.
2021

Copan | Senior Systems Administrator Manager

In this role, I helped redesign and modernize the campus, core and global sd-wan infrastructure across Copan Italia (Headquarter), Copan Industries (Puerto Rico), Copan Diagnostics (California), Copan Medical (Shanghai). I designed and implemented a global Tier 1 connectivity with the leading provider (LUMEN), migrating also the obsolete MPLS circuit and leveraging a highly efficient DWDM circuit with multiple 10 Gbps channels at the headquarters campus allowing to interconnect all premises facilities with the two Data centers exiting with multiple DIA links to connect remote branches with maximum performance and flexibility thanks to a complete redesigned MAN over local dark fiber circuit. A dedicated Microsoft ExpressRoute uplink was implemented to improve performance, security, and efficiency for Microsoft Azure. In Puerto Rico facility, I analyzed the existing Data Center and network topology and rebuilt it from scratch: a remarkable project featuring double internal single-mode fiber circuit isolated in EMT conduit pipes for maximum resistance connecting eight IT Rooms to the on-premise Data Center, the project follow a complete facility redesign in a mesh network topology with two cores located in two strategically designated rooms. I contributed to business continuity planning by designing a second offsite Data Center located on the opposite side of the island and designed an Inmarsat satellite backup solution. Alongside the network and Data Center project, I start introducing Open Source into the IT organization and I designed the Puerto Rico Network Operation Center developing the monitoring solution on Zabbix and Grafana extendinig the monitoring to the OT environment starting with the analysis of Schneider PowerTag Energy, with a special development of dedicated ZPL scripts for Zebra monitoring and handling based on Zebra PPME software.
2014

Storm Interactive | Director of Software Engineering

As Software Engineering Director, I led the design and development of both frontend and backend applications, including Barclays software for Microsoft Surface and the Moncler iPad app used across Moncler boutiques worldwide.
2013

Suyara | Founder and Chief Technology Officer

In 2012 I developed SFS, a file system created ad-hoc for the Cloud Storage platform that born later on in 2013. SFS was designed to manage large data volumes distributed in chunk on multiple servers in multiple Datacenters located in Europe. In January 2013 I developed the Suyara cloud storage platform, which was presented on October 8 of the same year in Portugal at ESAD University during the Keynote which was attended by 1500 people including students, lecturers and the public outside the faculty. In the 3 months since its launch, Suyara acquired 38000 users by developing a data exchange traffic equal to 2PB (Petabyte). In 2015 I developed the Suyara Supergate webserver with the aim of increasing the performance of large data exchange to and from the Suyara network and increasing its security through end to end data encryption, the same year, ORACLE published a case study of the platform.
2011

Storm Interactive | Technical Director

In these three years I had held the position of Team Leader and Technical Director of numerous projects for multinationals including the development direction for the automated playout platform SKY able to generate TGA templates for SKY Sport channels whose key point was the ability to make operators totally independent from the use of Adobe Photoshop by offering sophisticated automation for the generation and broadcasting of TV templates. Also in this period I directed the development of the application for METRO AG able to automate the registration of new customers and the import data in SAP.
2008

Storm Interactive | User Experience Manager

My career began in Storm Interactive, alongside the Art Director of the UIDT (User Interface Design Team) developing graphical interfaces for numerous software for a diversified platforms and mobile applications with frontend interfaces and backends for web portals. During this time I contributed to the development of the mobile application UX and UI of the iconic Italian brand 'Vimar' with Vimar By-me and Vimar Fai il Punto. Following the mobile launch, both applications receive two prestigious FWA awards.