Is there still a place for tape storage?

The main advantage of tapes is that it's easy to put them into a rotation scheme and store them off-site for long term backup. You can do the same with disks, but usually they're not that easily fitted into a rotation cycle, and you'll have to store them carefully to avoid damaging them (same goes for tape as well of course, but they're easier to handle).

In the backup environment I manage we have two tape libraries. One is an LTO-2 Library and the other is IBM TS1120's.

On average we can store upwards of 1TB of data per tape, at a cost of about $50 per. Our primary library has a rough capacity of 750TB and uses the space of about 12 floor tiles and very little power.

Disk storage is definitely on the rise, but when using enterprise backup software, you can utilize disk technologies to store your active data, leverage de-duplication and snap-shotting, cross-site synchronization, and still put older versions of data away on tape.

Tape is also very useful to satisfy many audit requirements which force you to store large amounts of data, such as email, for long periods of time (7 years).

The short answer is, yes, tape is still very much alive and has a place in the enterprise and it will for the foreseeable future.

You can easily satisfy your speed requirements by storing active data on disk and long term data on tape, and you will have the flexibility of sending tapes off-site for disaster recovery purposes.