Ultimately, it boils down to your enviroment, service aggrements, go with 
the vendor that can support your product end to end, STK\HP\IBM are all 
good vendors, trouble comes when lib vendor or other hardware vendors in 
the equation do not want to take owenership of the issues.
I used IBM tape\lib\drives and am pretty happy with thier support, the 
only thing with IBM is their utilities for Drive managment are not the 
best, while HP does have some nice GUI utilities.
I have used all tape brands, chose a vendor based on serice, when and if 
tapes go bad how the warranty support and diag support is, otherwise price 
is the factor here.

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