Google wants to shift heavy users of its cloud services away from an open-source, community-developed filesystem and into its own proprietary Colossus tech.

The upgrade was announced by the web overlord in a blog post on Tuesday that announced admins could now store Hadoop-destined data directly in Google's closed-sourced Colossus-based "Google Cloud Storage Service", and threw mud at the traditional Hadoop File System (HDFS) plugin.

The service, we're told, provides a more efficient connector between Google's cloud storage and compute services, and represents another advance in the Chocolate Factory's rent-a-server infrastructure which competes with Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Hadoop is an open-source data analysis platform based on ideas outlined in the Google File System and Map Reduce papers which came out of Google in the early 2000s.

Since Hadoop's genesis at Yahoo! in the 2000s it has become a standard component of any data analyst's open-source toolkit, and its development is stewarded by companies including Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Google, though, would prefer it if users of its cloud opted for the closed-source Colossus-based Google Cloud Storage. To tempt them over to the system, it has listed some of the benefits of using Colossus over HDFS. These benefits, according to Google, include "no storage management overhead", "high data availability", and "quick start up."

Colossus has multiple master nodes which gets around some of the redundancy problems that bedevil early HDFS implementations. It also uses Reed-Solomon erasure codes to perform error correction which, Google says, "achieve similar resilience to failures compared to replication, though with less storage overhead."

Developers should bear in mind that using the cloud storage service locks them further into Google's own idiosyncratic way of doing things and pushes them further away from the main filesystem of the open-source large-scale data community. ®

Related stories

• Cloudera bags $160m from Google Ventures and Mike Dell (19 March 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/19/cloudera_raises_160m/

• Chinese boffins ginger up Hadoop with OpenFlow funnel (18 March 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/18/boffins_hasten_hadoop_with_softwaredefined_networking/

• Elders tell cluster tool Apache Spark it's time to quit chillin' in the crib (18 February 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/18/hadoop_spark_graduation/

• Cloudera lights Spark under Hadoop (6 February 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/06/cloudera_lights_spark_under_hadoop/

• Oracle releases 'lite' virtual Big Data appliance (30 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/30/oracle_releases_big_data_dev_tool/

• Yahoo! chief operating officer de Castro exits web biz after just one year (16 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/16/yahoo_coo_de_castro_leaves/

• You came for the free tools, stayed with your credit card – Amazon's new cloud brainwave (15 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/15/amazon_software_giveaway/

• Intel uncorks marketing syrup, pours over 16 cloud providers (15 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/15/intel_cloud_marketing/

• Sniff, sniff, what's that burning smell? Oh, it's Google's patent-filing office working flat out (14 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/14/google_hits_the_patent_bigtime_reports/

• Top Microsoft bod: ARM servers right now smell like Intel's (doomed) Itanic (10 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/10/microsoft_arm_adoption/

• So you want to build the next Google. Who ya gonna call? Er, Big Blue? (9 January 2014)

  https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/09/ibm_resource_scheduler_upgrade/

• Google follows Amazon with auto-encryption of cloud data (15 August 2013)

  https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/15/google_cloud_encryption/

• Google adds crowd control tech to infrastructure cloud (7 August 2013)

  https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/07/google_load_balancing/