"The vaulting technology was important for us from a disaster recovery standpoint," Hughes said. "And it's multithreading, so [it] can run up to eight backups at once."

Hughes said restoring applications and operating systems from a bad server used to take more than 24 hours; with the RRS box, it takes about an hour. "And I don't spend nearly the time maintaining backups as I was before," he said.

Arun Taneja, an analyst at Taneja Group Inc. in Hopkinton, Mass., said that while Unitrends' technology is not unique, it's rare for vendors to produce a product that restores data, applications and operating systems through one integrated tool set. Other products tend to be scaled-down versions of enterprise-class technologies from larger vendors such as EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., Taneja said.

What sets Unitrends apart is that its product was created for small-to-midsize businesses.

"These guys have been focused from the very beginning on that space," Taneja said. "The other aspect is that it's not just backup and restore, but replication and WAN replication all built into one."