Burgard, who is the assistant vice chancellor for university computing and communications, and his staff have also been toiling to shore up the school's IT systems for the possibility of another big storm. Like many other users working on similar initiatives in the section of the Gulf Coast ravaged by Katrina, he had hoped to meet a self-imposed deadline of last Thursday. That day marked the official start of this year's hurricane season.

But Burgard now doesn't expect to finish all the work needed to overhaul and upgrade his business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities until the end of August.

The University of New Orleans is still running 75 percent of its mission-critical applications on 25 servers housed at Louisiana State University's data center in Baton Rouge. The school had planned to shift those applications back to its own data center by mid-April, but Burgard said it ran into delays in upgrading its air conditioning and uninterruptible power supply systems and installing a new generator powered by natural gas. The culprit: the difficulty of snagging scarce -- and pricey -- contractors to do the work.

"It didn't make a lot of sense to switch our applications back to campus and have to deal with outages because of the work we're doing in the computer room," Burgard said. His new goal is to complete the data center upgrades by the end of this month.

The servers at LSU will remain there even after the work in New Orleans is done, turning the makeshift Baton Rouge data center into a hot-swappable disaster recovery site. Burgard plans to mirror and replicate the university's data to those servers so they can take over processing if the New Orleans campus has to be evacuated again. He said it likely will take until late August to finish setting up the replication process.