The New SDLT drives or even the new AIT drives, you can get a system together that'll do nearly everything you need.
SDLT (bare-drives) are costing $4700 brand-new, $6500 with retail kit.
For that money, you could buy a setup with SCSI drives or like I did with the SATA and PATA drives. The hotswap features needed are nearly perfectly aligned with SATA and SATA-II. Reducing the costs of these cages.
Promise make a 12 drive SATA-II capable rackmount. It works with 2 of their cards or 1 of 3ware's. It is cheaper than you think, would work just fine from a 2-4U rackmount system. You could put a single Hot-swap slot cage for the backup media in the actual machine.
Soon, real soon, I foresee Storage cabinets with mountains of SATA drives and a robot to insert and manage the drives in 4-16 swap slots.
This will be the backup of the future, the tape drives will no longer be needed, Drive technology will just keep getting bigger and cheaper and faster.
Watchout for iSCSI and storage arrays 150 Kilometers away from the machine(s) using them, with additional mirrors even farther away.