RE: Physical Tape Alternatives?

Kevin,
We too, were a shop which was using TS3100 (just threw out the books when cleaning the machine room yesterday). And, yes, we were, and are still, using BRMS.
We moved to EMC Data Domain 2500. We moved from LTO4 to emulating LTO5. We immediately got rid of the TS3100 (with four drives and multiple expansion units) while it still had some residual value. We kept a backup LTO5 drive on hand for quite some time in case we needed it. We never hooked it up and after a year or two, sold it.

The DD2500 does multiple styles. Part of it we have emulating IBM tape drives. Part of it acts as offline storage for IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager or whatever the nom du jour is.

Our shop has two data centers. One DC has one Power 9 with 5 lpars of IBM i, two of VIOS and one of AIX. It backs up locally to it's DD2500.
The other DC has one P9 and one P8. Each have 5 lpars of IBM i and two lpars of VIOS. The P9 also has our busy AIX lpar which does only TSM backing up all of our VM machines, PC's, Windows servers.
Each DD2500 has multiple virtual drives configured which allows us to run multiple parallel saves simultaneously.
Each DC replicates the tapes in it's DD2500 to the other DD2500 in the other DC. And, yes, we have restored on to the remote system. Great for refreshing a test library on the development lpar. Backup on prodbackup in Grand Rapids. Restore on to devmain in Kendallville.

Let's look at the backup P9 in the DC I'm in. We use Quick-EDD to replicate our production lpar and our development lpars to it. It also has two Domino lpars serving up multiple Domino servers on each.
RACK2HST - IBM i - 23TB. Hosts all disk for the other four lpars of IBM i and the lpar of AIX
GDWEB2 - IBM i - 447GB. One Domino lpar (DMZ backup)
GDIHQ2 - IBM i - 5.7TB. Backup production lpar
GDISYS2 - IBM i - 3.3TB. Backup development lpar
MAILTWO - IBM i - 1.6TB. Backup Domino cluster for 7 Domino servers.

We do NOT do full system saves every night.

BRM1380 = Begin processing for control group &1 type &2.
BRM1049 = Control group &1 type &2 processing is complete.

MAILTWO BRM1380 2020-01-15 19:30:01.000000
MAILTWO BRM1049 2020-01-15 20:05:40.000000
GDWEB2 BRM1380 2020-01-16 01:30:00.000000
GDWEB2 BRM1049 2020-01-16 01:41:31.000000
GDIHQ2 BRM1380 2020-01-15 23:30:05.000000
GDIHQ2 BRM1049 2020-01-16 01:21:01.000000
GDISYS2 BRM1380 2020-01-15 17:30:02.000000
GDISYS2 BRM1049 2020-01-15 18:43:20.000000

And, yes, I do have some nice SQL against BRMS files.

Rob Berendt