OK, so you COULD go with a goofy, proprietary format, supported only by Sony, the worst possible company to do business with, at a cost of $250 per 1.5TB WORM media and without an autoloader, without proper connectivity (USB 3? No thanks. SAS, FC-AL, or iSCSI for me), and that will likely be totally unrecoverable 10 years from now due to lack of hardware.
But, lasers! It's OK, I'm not trying to give you shit for no reason. I just had a C-level talking to me about our data retention plans, but his favorite buzzword was "cloud". I had to explain to him that a full weekly backup, once you factored in transit time, bandwidth and all of that, would cost about $3000. Per. Week. Not counting restores, which would be cripplingly expensive.
What we ended up getting was a dual LTO5 autoloader (48 slot, FC-AL), surplussed from the local guys. Total cost of the library, plus backup exec licensing, plus 100 tapes, plus a HBA and cabling and warranties and all that jazz was about $11,000, and it can kick out a 1.5TB tape in 2.5 hours (5 if i I want an immediate, separate full verify). The tapes are nigh-unto-indestructible, and can last for, easily, 20-30 years with proper storage. Hardware will be, at that time, probably a little hard to come by (LTO7 will be the last generation that can read them, and will probably be out in 2018-2020 or so), but should still be available, and cheap. We spend about $300 per month sending all the tapes to Iron Mountain just in case the building really does burn down.
I know this to be true since all, so far as I am aware, all LTO gear is now produced by IBM, which will still sell you a brand new mainframe to run code written in the late 50s with no modifications. That's support, right there. Just swallow your pride and go tape, you will be glad you did. It's still pretty hard to beat for archival storage bang-for-buck, unless you are Facebook or something, in which case, MOAR DISKS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
