One of the advantages of using the Commvault Idata Agent ( or agents like it ) would be if you no longer had to use space on your production disk hardware for sql backup files. ( netapp in our case) However, since we won't have an agent license on any of our DEV sql servers and those DEV sql servers are at our office, not at the Raging Wire server facility like our prod hardware, I would have to do a native SQL "copy_only" backup somewhere, possibly over a link to our office that isn't super-fast. Or perhaps do that copy_only backup to one of the prod sql servers that had space ( several hundred Gigs)

Or we would have to restore a commvault backup to a database on one of our prod sql servers, detach that and copy it to a DEV sql server at our office. I still have not gotten a definitive answer as to whether commvault can write out a Microsoft Tape Format standard sql BAK file.