I wish tape archival was easier to get into. But because it's niche and mainly enterprise, drives usually start in the multiple thousands of dollar range unless you go way down in capacity to less than a modern SSD.
I'm not sure you can distinguish those.
It is IBM, and IBM has a preference for who its customers are.
So do enterprises, who like the sound of "no one ever got fired for..."
And it's also because the market is pretty small (at least in terms of sites) - there's just not that much total accessible market for any competitor.
there are a couple tape makers, regardless of how many companies rebadge the product.
afaik, there are only 2-3 drive makers too.
but don't forget that tape doesn't make much sense (in its market) without the robotic library. there might be some off-brands that sell small libraries, but the big ones are, afaik, dominated by IBM.
I'm just talking about single drive units you manually swap tapes on. That would still make an excellent long term cold backup for me even if I did have to swap the tape s once a week but they're still 4k+ unless I go all the way down to LTO-5 tapes that are just ~1.5TB which could be good enough for critical things but not really helpful for backing up everything.
