Putting to rest many of the claims that tape has passed its prime, this Clipper Note from The Clipper Group confirms that tape can be an important cost-saving storage technology for long-term archiving of big files in a tiered storage architecture.  A couple of highlights:

• For long-term archiving of digital data, the average disk-based solution costs 15 times the average tape-based solution. 
• The cost of energy alone for the average disk-based solution exceeds the entire TCO for the average tape-based solution.