In the you heard it here first category, comes Cemaphore Systems, a little known but very successful e-mail disaster recovery and business continuity software company for Microsoft Exchange environments.

Founded in 2002 with offices in Provo, Utah and San Mateo, Calif., Cemaphore was founded by Tyrone Pike, formerly of Ungermann-Bass, Citrix and LAN Systems.

Cemaphore, like we said before, makes software that ensures the availability of Microsoft Exchange servers. The software, which is installed on a dedicated Windows 2003 server, allows the recovery of individual e-mails and message boxes, as well as entire e-mail servers. Data is replicated continuously from the primary site to the secondary disaster recovery site and as it is being replicated, it is also being de-duplicated.

The company competes with products from Double-Take, the Neverfail Group, Teneros and CA’s XOSoft.

Stay tuned for more on this newcomer to the e-mail DR/BC space. You be sure to hear from them more.

Cemaphore’s MailShadow is licensed on a per mailbox basis for $50.

EMC trumped the storage industry today with its announcement of flash-based solid state drives for its Symmetrix DMX-4 storage arrays.

The company, in partnership with STEC, introduced what it calls Enterprise Flash Drives. These drives, which deliver the same amount of IOPs as 30 15,000RPM 300GB drives, will be used by organizations for their transaction processing applications.

The EMC Enterprise Flash Drive is different than the multi-level cell flash technology used in consumer electronics. Instead it uses Single-level NAND flash-based storage that fits in a standard disk carrier and can be upgraded non-disruptively.

Additionally, for those energy-conscious users out there, the flash drives consume as much as 38% less power than traditional disk drives.

EMC has dubbed its Enterprise Flash Drives ‘tier zero,’ adding to the Tier 1 represented by Fibre Channel drives and the Tier 2 of Serial ATA drives.

Using Enterprise Flash Drives in a Symmetrix will come at about a 10% premium, a bargain for those financial institutions and other organizations that need the performance.

The flash drives are expected to be available in 73GB and 146GB capacities by the end of the first quarter of this year.

While no announcements have yet been made, you can expect IBM, Hitachi and others to follow suit.

The rumor mill is starting early this year — tomorrow, that is. If it is to be believed, IBM is set to acquire XIV, an Israeli company involved in making a grid-based storage array, for between $300 and $350 million.

XIV (14 — the atomic number for silicon) Information Systems was founded in 2002 by five graduates of the Israeli armies’ high-tech Talpiot program, including Moshe Yanai, the developer of EMC’s Symmetrix storage array.

XIV’s NEXTRA array is supposed to be less expensive that other enterprise storage from companies such as EMC, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. According to a story in NetworkComputing , Ofir Zohar, CEO of XIV claims that NEXTRA will cost $5,000 per terabyte. In a NEXTRA array, data is divided into 1MB blocks and written across many drives. Zohar claims that with this approach, rebuilding a failed drive takes only 15 minutes.

If NEXTRA is all Zohar claims it to be, IBM could soon be adding a new weapon to its storage arsenal.

Symantec’s ‘green data center’ study points out how little IT is actually doing to make their data centers more energy efficient.

The company recently released a study focusing on ITs’ efforts to implement green data centers. The survey pointed out that although the majority of data center managers are starting to think about implementing green data centers, only one in seven global data center managers have implemented or started to implement energy-efficient savings in their data centers.

Symantec, who surveyed 250 Global 2000 data center managers, says that as data centers are running out of space and as energy costs are skyrocketing, it is forcing data center managers to look for ways to make their data centers more energy-efficient.

Many data center managers have consolidated the servers in their data centers by using virtualization software – as many as half of the respondents cited virtualization efforts – to save on energy costs. Data center managers also need to also look at implementing servers and storage technologies that use more efficient CPUs and power supplies and improving the airflow, cooling and heat removal capabilities in their data centers.

The survey highlighted that the companies surveyed spent an average of $1.4 million each year on electricity for their data centers. Over half – 57% — are starting to talk about green data centers and as many as 29% haven’t even started considering the benefits of going green.

For most of the respondents – 68% — going green by reducing energy consumption was a high or critical priority. Approximately 1/3 of the respondents said reducing their use of hazardous and toxic materials was a high priority.

One of the most interesting conclusions of the survey, was that energy-efficiency was cited as an important factor in selecting a hardware vendor. A number of storage vendors, including Copan Systems, 3PAR, Compellent and Plasmon have ‘at-the-ready’ energy efficient pitches made for their products.

Asking vendors to address how their gear is energy efficient is a first step in power-savings in the data center. According to a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report, computer gear accounts for as much as 50% of data center energy costs.

The EPA report estimates that by 2011 U.S. businesses could reduce their electricity costs by $4.1 billion annually just by following best practices detailed in the report. Since electricity costs in data centers in 2006 were $4.5 billion, that’s a lot of savings.