Working with the resource manager

An IBM® Content Manager resource manager controls a collection of managed resources (objects). It also manages the necessary storage and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) infrastructure, but you must first configure the resource manager to support HSM. Resource managers have facilities to support type-specific services for more than one type of object, such as streaming, zipping, extracting, encrypting, encoding, transcoding, searching, or text mining.

A single resource manager is used exclusively by one library server. Each resource manager delivered by the IBM Content Manager system provides a common subset of native data access APIs through which it is accessible by the controlling library server, by other IBM Content Manager components, and by applications, either locally (on the same network node) or remotely.

Other data access APIs allow remote access to a resource manager by using the resource manager client support or a standard network access protocol such as CIFS, NFS, or FTP. For remote access, use a client-server connection. Clients communicate with IBM Content Manager resource managers by using HTTP through the use of a standard Web server. Data delivery is based on HTTP, FTP, and FS data transfer protocols. Using HTTP, any application or IBM Content Manager component that must access content managed by IBM Content Manager can dynamically form a triangle with a library server and resource manager. This triangle forms a direct data access path between the application and each resource manager, and a control path between the library server and the resource manager. You can map this conceptual triangle to any network configuration, ranging from a single-node configuration to a geographically distributed one.

The new architecture also accommodates resource managers that an application is not able to access directly, such as a host-based subsystem, a single-user system that does not handle access control, or a system containing highly sensitive information where direct access by an application is not allowed by business policy. In this case, access to such resource managers is indirect. Both the pull and the push paradigms of data transfer are accommodated by the IBM Content Manager system as well as synchronous and asynchronous calls.

For information about how to configure a resource manager see the SResourceMgrDefCreationICM sample in the samples directory.