I work with a group that uses Actifio for on-premises SQL Server backups. Google purchased Actifio a few years back and is finally getting around to retiring the software for on-premises. Actifio had an interesting collection of features:
- A local agent does snapshot backups using the VSS writer. (This is fairly common)
- Actifio would dedupe the backups (not compress). This resulted in subsequent backups taking a tiny amount of space. (This exists on a few backup appliances I have found so far)
- Multiple Actifio appliances would copy those backups between them providing offsite backup. (This seems fairly uncommon)
- Actifio could present those snapshotted MDF and LDF files to new servers as writeable databases using Actifio storage. (I haven't found anything that does this yet)
The last point is the magic for us. Actifio could mount those databases on new servers for us. In practice, this meant that a new LUN would appear on the server with the MDF and LDF files and be attached to the SQL Server. We could read and write just like any normal database (but much, much slower). This didn't take any disk space on the local server at all -- Actifio provided the storage.
Has anyone found a product that does backups and allows those snapshotted databases to be attached to a new server?
Edit: The two tools I'm looking at so far are VEEAM and Rubrik. Rubrik seems close but I'm not sure if the Live Mounts are writeable yet. What other tools are out there?