The Library of Congress does exactly what you've described every day. A researcher desires to download a 50 minute archived video. A request is sent from their

The Library of Congress does exactly what you've described every day. A researcher desires to download a 50 minute archived video. A request is sent from their laptop to a lookup table server. The lookup table contains the metadata for where that file is stored. Then the request is passed to a media server which has an SSD and RAM large enough for receiving the actual media file. It opens a connection with the tape library. The tape library handles loading the media from tape to a staging server, which also has an SSD. So totally the media file goes from tape, to staging SSD via hardwire, to main server's SSD over the network, to client's device over the network.