You could use GlideinWMS, which was made to manage a pool of dynamic grid resources for scientific computing, such as the Open Science Grid. It can also manage personal Condor pools too. I believe it can also connect to Amazon EC2, but I don't see a lot of information on their web-page about that. You may have to contact them for more information, but I know that the team is very responsive and interested in finding more scientific users. You can find more information here: http://www.uscms.org/SoftwareComputing/Grid/WMS/glideinWMS/doc.prd/index.html

You can use Apache Hadoop's HDFS. http://hadoop.apache.org/hdfs/ It is fairly simple to set up, very scalable, and it is very easy to set up a replication factor so that all your data is replicated 2, 3 or even more number of times across your cluster. It is used at many places for distributed computing, but I see no reason that it couldn't serve you well as a large personal file service.

Open Nebula (http://opennebula.org/) is a pretty good platform for making your own cloud services. Most of the open source cloud products are still new and evolving though, so there is usually some work needed after it is installed.

I agree with the other posters that ancestry.com is a bit pricey, but sometimes it can be worth it. They have a lot of information that you can search through all in one place. Its good to try out for a month or two, then cancel your subscription and load all the information you got into one of the open source solutions that people have mentioned. I their search is pretty good actually. It does return a lot of irrelevant information sometimes, but it will also do some guessing if their is someone with a similar name or birth date. It is nice if someone made a mistake and misspelled the name on a census report, the search will probably still return it. Sometimes you get a connection that you never would have found otherwise.

Does anyone else remember the NextStep OS that used to ship on those black Next machines? I'd vote for that OS to come back. It had a good interface for its day. Too bad neither Next or NextStep took off. I think Apple wound up buying it up.

A man gets to a train station at exactly 5pm everyday. His wife immediately picks him up and drives him home. One day, he arrives early at 4pm. Instead of waiting, he begins walking home on the route his wife drives along. His wife picks him up somewhere along the route from the train station to his house. He gets home 10 minutes early. How long did he walk?