We have 3 separate environments: a production ,a staging and an archive/backup environment
A) Is it possible to have Analytics and Reporting services set up only on the archive environment? The archive environment would basically be a duplicate of the production, or is it critical that they operate on the environment that the original transaction happens? (Maybe the services need all exact logs etc?)
The point of this is to be able to “lighten” the critical system that is production, and move the burden to the archive where the services can consume more resources freely, without querying/disturbing the production environment.
B) Is there a reliable way to keep the archive/backup automated and reliable? We are looking into the Redgate SQL tools, but any (preferably open source) suggestions or experience in this part would be invaluable.
A) Yes, and this is a very common reporting or data warehousing configuration. You run your queries or build your data warehouse on a copy of production, in order to avoid impacting performance.
B) There are plenty of options supported by SQL Server itself: backup/restore, replication, log shipping. But you will need to look into the pros and cons of each one to find the best fit, e.g. how up to date do you need data to be on the reporting system?
Basically, you seem to be asking about implementing a reporting solution using a copy of a production database. As I mentioned, this is a very common scenario and you will find a lot of information on this site and elsewhere by Googling.