ISS Technology Update Volume 8, Number 3
7
Meet the Expert—Wayne Vuong
Wayne Vuong has been an Engineering Program Manager with Industry Standard
Servers (ISS) for the last three years of his 12-year career at HP. Wayne has
distinguished himself because of his hard work and passion for getting customer
input to engineering teams so they can incorporate it into their design decisions.
Engineering was a natural progression for Wayne because even at an early age
he was very analytical, creative, and detail oriented. He enjoys puzzles and math
problems. His favorite pastimes are fishing, billiards, card games, and playing the
piano. He and his wife, Yisel, have a 4-year old son, Jonathan, who is well
protected by their 12-year old beagle, Maggie.
A passion for customer input
Wayne is highly regarded for his support of the ISS Technical Advisory Committee
(TAC), a professional social network that facilitates interaction between HP
customers and ISS technologists. According to his manager, Jeoff Krontz,
“Wayne’s involvement with TAC yielded excellent customer feedback that affected
product decisions.” In fact, Wayne says that almost all product design decisions
are a result of customer feedback received from marketing, management, and
direct customer visits.
Helping drive the Common Design effort
Wayne also architected the successful Common Design process that has been implemented in fifth-generation (G5) and G6
ProLiant servers, and led the Common Design team for G5 and midway into G6. The Common Design effort creates a server
schematic that is directly shared by most ProLiant design teams, significantly increasing design quality and efficiencies.
Synchronizing all platforms with the same proven design virtually eliminates design errors that may occur if, for example, one
platform intentionally or unintentionally implements a circuit differently. The Common Design effort also prevents communication
errors or breakdowns where information may not be disseminated properly, which can result in a platform having a design
quality issue.
Wayne says that getting the Common Design process to work was very challenging because many believed that it could not be
done. Also, various hurdles kept appearing that could have derailed the effort. Nevertheless, Wayne kept implementing
workarounds to keep the Common Design vision alive.
In the end, having server platform teams use common designs gave many engineers more bandwidth to focus on other design
activities. As these design activities were finished, they were also automatically incorporated by the other platform teams
through the Common Design effort. This further reduced the design effort expended by each platform team, resulting in even
more free engineering bandwidth.
Impressed by ProLiant G6 servers’ power efficiency
When asked which technologies exemplify HP’s leadership, Wayne remarked that the ability of ProLiant G6 servers to
dynamically balance power efficiency with performance through HP iLO (Onboard Administrator) is phenomenal. Power and
thermal controls embedded into Onboard Administrator reduce server power consumption by regulating processor speed and
the operation of other server components, such as fans, power supplies, and unpopulated I/O and memory slots.
Name: Wayne Vuong
Title: Engineering Program Manager, ISS
Years at HP: 12
University: BSEE, Rice University
MEE, Rice University
U.S. Patents: 2
Name: Wayne Vuong
Title:
Engineering Program Manager, ISS
Years at HP: 12
University: BSEE, Rice University
MEE, Rice University
U.S. Patents: 2
