We recently researched these for work.

They tick a lot of boxes - lots of space, reasonable speed, great cold storage figures. Reasonably priced tapes. Agree, they’re the best thing. The slow read speed isn’t quite as bad as expected (They can go extremely fast in seek mode), but definitely something to consider. We were okay with that for our needs.

But damn, the price of the hardware was horrendous - we got priced (I think) close to £20k for a suitable drive that met our needs. Completely killed the project. And remember that if you’re doing site replication for DR, you’ll need at least two of them. Sadly, it looks like we’ll be using external HDD’s for a while longer…

We replaced our vm hosts recently with AMD ones - literally half the price with a lot more performance.

Xeon’s always led the pack for enterprise hardware, but no longer. Confidence in Intel has been dropping for a while.

That’s them dead soon, then.