The print media company I used to work for, which had an almost bottomless collection of massive image files, used a large tape robot and had its office across

The print media company I used to work for, which had an almost bottomless collection of massive image files, used a large tape robot and had its office across the street from an Iron Mountain storage depot. The Mac guys would work with small images then the workflow tools (TWIST afair) would issue requests for the huge versions, which would produce a daily request to Iron Mountain to bring us the right tapes. The next day we'd feed those tapes into the robot and the full resolution jobs would be completed, rendered, uploaded to appropriate FTP servers and the tapes would be returned to storage in the next daily Iron Mountain pickup. Poor latency, but massive throughput and storage :)