I would refer anyone genuinely interested in sibling pend to download and 
review Dr. H. Pat Artis's "Sibling Pend: Like a Wheel Within a Wheel" 1996 CMG 
paper (available to download at Dr. Pat's site http://www.perfassoc.com ).  
While the technology underpinning storage has changed a lot the concept of 
sibling pend really hasn't.  I suspect this paper isn't new, though, for many 
on this list.


NTAC:3NS-20

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From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of 
Pommier, Rex
Sent: Monday, July 11, 2022 10:21 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [EXT] Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: EXTERNAL: Re: FedEx to move entirely to the 
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Hi Phil,

That is odd that there isn't more written about sibling pend.  IDK if solid 
state disk suffers to the same extent as spinning spindles but I would guess 
not.  Short description is that typical disk array configuration was to take 
the disks and carve them up into a bunch of smaller LUNs then distribute these 
LUNs out to the various servers sharing the array storage.  Think of how many 
3390-mod9s can fit on a 600 GB drive - and that's a small drive these days.  So 
when you're sharing the array between mainframe and Unix (in our case) or 
Windows, you can end up with some of the physical disk blocks being assigned to 
3390s and some to the other platforms.  Sibling pend is simply when one of the 
servers (or in our case the array itself on behalf of one of the Unix boxes) 
hogs all the I/O capability of the disk spindle, and doesn't allow any of the 
other hosts that need data off the spindle to get to it.

In our case, the mainframe was waiting up to a half second to get a single I/O 
from the spindles that were being consumed by the Unix/Oracle process.

Rex

Rex Pommier wrote, in part:
> I finally got a physical drive mapping from them and discovered it was
sibling pend between .



This "sibling pend" is intriguing. A grand total of 18 hits on Google; most of 
them are about DASD, so it's clear you didn't typo it or mishear it. But only 
18 seems unlikely, especially since the refs go back to 1996! Very odd.
I'd've thought in 25+ years there would have to have been more written about it.



I can't get much from those 18 links (paywalls etc.), and would love to 
understand this better, just for curiosity's sake-it's of no practical use to 
me in my current role. Anyone got any more details?



...phsiii (who is pretty sure there was some "sibling pend" between him and his 
sisters while growing up)


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