Content storage

Content storage capabilities

Content Cortex provides content storage as a core service. This service works with semantic search, document processing, and access control to enable content management and AI integration.

The content storage service provides the following capabilities:

Multi-device storage

Supports diverse storage technologies that include cloud storage, file systems, databases, and fixed content devices. This flexibility allows organizations to choose storage solutions that meet their performance, cost, and compliance requirements.

Lifecycle management

Automates content lifecycle policies for retention, archival, and disposition. Content moves through defined stages based on business rules, ensuring efficient storage utilization and regulatory compliance.

Governance

Provides policy-based storage management that ensures compliance with regulatory requirements. Works in conjunction with access control, legal holds, retention policies, and audit capabilities to enforce security and compliance.

These capabilities deliver measurable business value by reducing storage costs through automated lifecycle management, accelerating compliance processes with policy-based governance, and enabling faster decision-making through AI-powered content access and analysis.

Content storage serves as the repository that other services access to work with enterprise content. The RAG service accesses stored content for semantic search, the Enhanced Text Extraction service accesses stored documents for analysis, and access control mechanisms secure access to the stored content. Through the MCP (Model Context Protocol), AI agents access the content repository to perform intelligent operations across all object stores.

Storage options

Cloud storage devices and file storage devices can be attached to an advanced storage area. An advanced storage area provides high availability content storage and disaster recovery through replication and replica repair. This capability is accomplished without relying on any special features of the underlying storage devices, so advanced storage areas can be applied to commodity storage. An advanced storage area supports heterogeneous storage devices and uses the Content Platform Engine sweep service and server communication service for replication, content deletion, and abandoned content backout.

A file storage area is an area that contains document content in a directory tree on a local or shared network drive. The disk drive can be a Windows NTFS volume, a UNIX file system, or an IBM® General Parallel File System (GPFS).

A database storage area converts document content into binary large objects (BLObs) for storage in the database that is specified as the object store database.

A fixed content storage system is an external repository that acts like a virtual storage area for the Content Platform Engine system. Content Federation Services provides connectivity and configuration for the repository. Fixed content Storage Systems potentially provide large storage capacity and typically provide WORM (write once, read many) and retention capabilities. You can use FileNet® Image Services as a fixed content storage system, and other Storage Systems such as Spectrum Protect.

Security and compliance