Not OP, but similar situation, trying to figure out tape archiving, already using SAS.
However, is there no open formats? The whole LTO ecosystem of course reeks of enterprise, and I'd expect by now at least one hardware hacker had picked together some off-the-shelf components to build something that is magnitude cheaper to acquire, maintain and upgrade.
The LTO cartridges are cheap and the programs that you need for using LTO tape drives are open source.
The only problem is that the LTO tape drives are very expensive. If you want to use 18 TB LTO-9 tapes, the cost per TB is much lower than for HDDs, but you need to store at least a few hundred TB in order to recover the cost of the tape drive.
There is no chance to see less expensive tape drives because there is no competition and it would be extremely difficult for anyone to become a competitor as it is difficult to become able to design and manufacture the mechanical parts of the drive and the reading and writing magnetic heads.
Short answer: no
Tape is really complicated and physically challenging, and there are no incentives for people investing insane amounts of time for something that has almost no fan base. See the blog post about why you don’t want tape from some time ago.
Edit: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/lto-tape-backups-for-linux-n...
> there are no incentives for people investing insane amounts of time for something that has almost no fan base
Like that has stopped anyone before? :p Probably explain why we haven't seen anything FOSS in that ecosystem yet though.