LTO4 holds 1.6TB (or 800GB if the data is already pre-compressed - ie JPG's or MP3's). Write speed of a theoritical 120Mb/sec (about the speed of gigabit ether

LTO4 holds 1.6TB (or 800GB if the data is already pre-compressed - ie JPG's or MP3's). Write speed of a theoritical 120Mb/sec (about the speed of gigabit ethernet). So unless you're running 10gigE these days - if you try and backup a server to tape through a network connection - the tape speed's probably not the bottleneck. So slightly better than the QIC tapes. I don't think anything compares cost wise (per TB) to a fitted out SL8500 / TS3500 or similar with LTO4.. Also - 10TB isn't that huge these days in terms of a backup environment.. All that being said - For anything under about 2TB/night I would be still be looking at getting away with just using disk (and replicating the backups to offsite).