OT: University Video shop: What are your best practices for keeping old footage and projects

I work at a University videotaping mostly talking head presentations with Powerpoint. Over the years I have accumulated 12TB of footage and projects. The two RAIDs, one an XRAID and the other is a Drobo iSCSI are near the end of their lives. We are looking for a solution to move the footage to a newer and larger RAID but also we are looking at how long we should keep the footage, projects, assets and etc. If you work at a college or university what is your policy on archives or how do you handle this much data. Our IT department does not want to use LTO for backup, they want some other solution. Even if you are not at a educational institution but instead at any other video production shop what do you do for archiving?

I'm a retired IT engineer, and I've worked with Apple and independently with universities, government & military installations, as well as broadcasters on system designs and implementations. IMHO your IT dept should very much be pushing LTO tape archive. It is the only long term, reliable, most bullet proof archiving solution around.

The only alternative are hard drives, either in an active RAID, or packaged and hibernating on a shelf. Active RAIDs eat up tons of electricity for their own power needs, and the needs of central air keeping them cooled. Then there's the expense of replacing drives as they fail over time. Then the expense of an identical unit as backup.

LTO is infinitely cheaper to maintain over time. It has proven itself to be reliable, long lasting, and easy to deal with, for decades now, and for decades to come. We are still far from a solid-state version of LTO tape. And hard drives are much more expensive over time, and more vulnerable to failure, and an infinitely shorter shelf life/life span.