IBM Image Services introduces support for Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) 7.3.x

Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) is a distributed storage system designed to support large, growing repositories of fixed-content data. An HCP system consists of both hardware (physical or virtual) and software. HCP stores objects that include both data and metadata that describes that data. HCP provides access to objects through a variety of industry-standard protocols, as well as through various HCP-specific interfaces.

FileNet Image Services interfaces with HCP through the CIFS or NFS protocols. The HCP appears as a standard CIFS/NTFS file system under Windows, or as a NFS/UFS file system under Unix. At archiving time, Image Services writes a FileNet content blob file in the directory structure of the file system mounted on the HCP system for each FileNet document, and applies retention settings.

Image Services sets the WORM state and the retention period immediately upon writing the blob file to the HCP device. An HCP object can be deleted only after the retention of an object has expired. Also, retention of an object can only be extended. Image Services supports:

• No retention (24 hour extension is set)
• Infinite retention
• Retention with offset or specific date

In the case where retention with an offset or specific date is selected, the document class  “Date Filed” (Chronological) or “Date Closed” (event-based retention) fields determine how the retention is set. If the “Date Filed” Chronological retention is set for the document class, the retention that is applied will be offset plus the current date. Otherwise, for a document class that uses “Date Closed” event-based retention, the initial retention value is the retention offset plus the current date or the specified date. A virtual event-based strategy includes running sds_update_retention periodically to trigger retention if the document has been closed based on doctaba settings (retention of object being set to closed date plus the offset) or to extend the retention to protect event-based retention objects from being deleted prematurely.

HCP does not yet support event-based retention.

Note: In the past, the Hitachi storage system was called Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP). The name for the newer version (3.0 onward) is Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). There are still references to HCAP in the Image Services error messages and console logs when configuring Image Services with an HCP storage system.

Requirements

• IS 4.1.2 FP 25
• IS 4.2.0 FP 14

Deployment
To configure HCP, refer to the Integral SDS user guide for the appropriate release.

• IS 4.1.2: ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/data/cm/filenet/docs/isdoc/412x/SDS.pdf
• IS 4.2.0: http://publibfi.dhe.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/c1933100.pdf

To verify that HCP is correctly configured as an Integral SDS device via fn_edit, refer to the following example elog entry that is generated when Image Services starts:

Dynamic Connector library: 'SDSw_HCAP'
  Device specific info: 'HCAP FileSytem SDSw connector library version=1.0 '
  Capacity: 50.000000GB (52428800KB)
  Used:     0.619141GB (649216KB) (1.24%)
  Free:     49.380859GB (51779584KB) (98.76%)
  Supports EBR=NO holds=NO retention_extend=YES

Here,
HCAP FileSytem SDSw refers to the HCP Device
EBR=NO means that event-based retention (EBR) is not supported.
holds=NO means ligation hold is not supported.
version=1.0 refers to the SDSw connector library version. It is not related to the HCP version number.