LTO Tape Archiving System STILL beats disk on capacity and overall cost

We just concluded an LTO tape library implementation to archive of 2.5 Petabytes of data at rest for a client on the East coast. It ceases to amaze me how spinning disk manufacturers still try to position their technology as archival grade. I strongly believe every storage technology platform has it's place. However, when vendors try to position their products as the solution to all problems that's when I take "professional offense" to such actions.
It's important for organizations to consider reclaiming space on primary storage environments. This eliminates the procurement of unnecessary additional disk clusters (I'm sure every disk storage manufacturer NetApp, HP etc will swear at me for saying this). Simply put, instead of simply buying more disk, why not reclaim space on primary clusters via archiving fixed/static data that's no longer used or accessed. Especially duplicate or triplicate data that's very rarely if ever used by the organization?
Back to my earlier anecdote, we proposed two solutions. An LTO 4 tape archive or a blu ray based optical storage library. Needless to say, our disk based competition (I won't name any names but as we all know their price points are about the same) tendered their proposals as well. Now I won't go into competitive details but succinctly, if you're looking to archive data that's not critical to the daily operations of the organization or rarely ever accessed would you go for the most cost effective with minimal performance trade offs or go for top of the line performance at astronomical cost?
Needless to say the tape archive proposal was almost $500,000 cheaper than the disk based competition and the optical option was roughly $325,000 cheaper. On value add, both systems delivered the offsite, cataloging, long term archival and reliability benefits the disk system simply didn't.
Now my point simply is; every storage platform has it's place. However, it's important to look beyond simply making a sale by truly listening to what the business and technical requirements are. I'm a firm believer that hearing and listening are two different things. Disk based systems thrive in environments that require speed, performance and high availability. However when discussing data storage or archiving it's important to look beyond those basic requirements. Most organizations only recently started getting into structured archive management due to the exponential data growth over the last decade. Archives are the final termination point for data and approaching those complex problems begin with understanding "WHY" the need to archive.

Alani Kuye
Phantom Data Systems
Data Storage Solutions