Sure, why not? It's an incremental cost of the backup system. Look at the current generation stuff. An LTO-8 drive puts 30TB onto a tape, but that's assuming 2.

Sure, why not? It's an incremental cost of the backup system. Look at the current generation stuff. An LTO-8 drive puts 30TB onto a tape, but that's assuming 2.5:1 compression, so the native capacity is only 12TB. Let's assume you're actually going to do the compression as you build the virtual tape. What's a 12TB hard disk cost these days? A lot less than the $4,000 that the tape drive costs. Heck, 12TB of SSD is going to be cheaper.