Re: Bye-bye tape drives
Dedup has no benefits during restores, for example your 12TB dedup data needs to be rehydrated so you actually restoring complete 12TB and even slower than restoring from tapes. Also no matter how you backup your data to a deduplication system, it is rarely stored contiguously on disk. Keep in mind defragmentation or housekeeping from backup dedup storage repository can cause heavy performance hits, it's common issue with SHA-256 hashing.
Tape has been IT data protection strategies for many years. Now cloud has emerged as a key technology for data protection improvement. While some may think that cloud can replace tape, and others saying the opposite, tape is not dead, the two technologies are actually complimentary when used in conjunction. Both offers different strengths to address specific IT challenges. Best practice is to keep two copies for redundancy, why not one copy on tape and the other backup stored in the cloud