Perhaps you weren't able to read the actual announcement from Evernote. They state that employees WILL be manually reading the notes, in order to improve their machine learning capabilities.

These are human beings reading confidential material. Abuse is incredibly likely.

From the FAQ:
"This is primarily to make sure that our machine learning technologies are working correctly, in order to surface the most relevant content and features to you. While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should."

There is this. Open source, encrypted, similar to Evernote. My concern is that I would dump all my data here and the kind folks running the project would move on to something else.

Disclaimer: I work for a storage vendor. Also a long time Slashdot reader though, so this isn't mean as a sales pitch.

Half of a petabyte is not really a lot of data in today's world. I talk to people every day that are trying to find ways to manages many PBs (into the hundreds) and are having challenges doing this with traditional storage. The trend that was started by the big Internet companies is to get rid of the fibre-channel SANs and instead solve the problem of storage using standard x86 servers. They use Linux as an abstraction layer from the hardware, and applications acting as storage systems too pool many servers together.

One of the challenges you need to get over is stretching a namespace that big without filesystem limitations like maximum inode counts. This is generally accomplished using some type of key/value store (object) under the hood. Single flat namespaces with no practical size barrier.

Some options that are available today are Swift from OpenStack and Ceph from Red Hat if you want to go the open source route. These can be good choices if you have the engineering staff on hand to piece it all together and the talent to keep it running. GPFS is also making a come back in this area, and there are a ton of startups looking at this space now.

My company has a commercial solution for this stuff. Pretty cool - it's a Linux app and runs on the server of your choice. I'l save you the sales pitch, and if you want you can try it for free on your own here: http://scality.com/trial

Whatever you choose, best of luck to you!

NxTop is pretty cool. It is a hypervisor that installs directly onto the client hardware, allowing you to pull and boot pre-configured images over the network. The hypervisor removes the need for specialized drivers and supports dual monitors. It also has the advantage over VMwareView of allowing the OS to sync for offline use if you would like to leave the office with a laptop. Sure VMware has it as an "experimental" feature now, but it is production with these guys. They came and did a demo for us the other day, pretty cool stuff. I think it was affordable too. You can set policies for who gets what images, remotely disable a lost or stolen laptop, etc. Check this out: http://www.virtualcomputer.com/About/press/nxtop-pc-management-launch-massively-scalable-desktop-virtualization-for-mobile-pcs