At the currently advertised reduced price of $7226, the Quantum SuperLoader 3 would be a good choice.
I would buy 2 of them, which together with all the other items and with 4 PB of tapes for the migration of the existing data would not exceed your estimated budget of $50k.
I assume that for this price you might get the 8-slot version. Quantum SuperLoader 3 can be extended to 16 slots, but I assume that for this you must buy an additional 8-cartridge removable active magazine. You should check the price for that.
Because I had good experience with the reliability of my Quantum tabletop tape drive, I would recommend this Quantum autoloader. Moreover, its datasheet includes all the expected information about reliability parameters, so they are tested by the manufacturer.
I consider the included backup software as useless. You should write your own backup scripts. You might need a few days for this, depending on the previous experience and on the support provided by the utilities specific to the file systems that you happen to use, but then you can be worriless for years, unlike when you depend for all your precious data on a black box proprietary program, which cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and which might write data in a format that cannot be recovered with any other tool (without an extensive reverse engineering work).
I would buy 2 of them, which together with all the other items and with 4 PB of tapes for the migration of the existing data would not exceed your estimated budget of $50k.
I assume that for this price you might get the 8-slot version. Quantum SuperLoader 3 can be extended to 16 slots, but I assume that for this you must buy an additional 8-cartridge removable active magazine. You should check the price for that.
Because I had good experience with the reliability of my Quantum tabletop tape drive, I would recommend this Quantum autoloader. Moreover, its datasheet includes all the expected information about reliability parameters, so they are tested by the manufacturer.
I consider the included backup software as useless. You should write your own backup scripts. You might need a few days for this, depending on the previous experience and on the support provided by the utilities specific to the file systems that you happen to use, but then you can be worriless for years, unlike when you depend for all your precious data on a black box proprietary program, which cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and which might write data in a format that cannot be recovered with any other tool (without an extensive reverse engineering work).