My first TechFest at SWU! Just me and 1,200+ friends all hooking up our laptops on a network to a zSeries mainframe for some hands on enablement. [Picture] We explored Websphere Portal, HATS, MQ, RSA and other software on a single 18 CPU zSeries running multiple LPARS. [Picture of specs] One LPAR is zOS and the other three are Redhat Linux. as you use the same software on each of the partitions you can’t tell the difference between the middleware running on zOS and Linux, which is very impressive. The mainframe is truly impressive, gone are the days of manditory raised floor and huge space requirements. This thing is sitting on a carpeted floor in the conference room. No special environment is required, just a big power cable going in. As the TechFest progresses with all the participants using the single mainframe server, they are monitoring performance of each of the LPARS to see what kind of load is hitting the system. Each if the partitiions are using under 3% of the CPU resources available, quite impressive.