Even now, the university is still running its mission-critical applications at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge on 25 servers -- some taken from its own data center, and some donated by LSU. But the New Orleans school is installing an uninterruptible power supply and a new generator powered by natural gas at its own facilities, Burgard said. When that work is completed in about six to eight weeks, the applications at LSU will be shifted back to the campus in New Orleans.

Even so, the university plans to leave the servers in place in Baton Rouge and mirror data to them so that the LSU location can function as a hot site if another disaster occurs. That strategy is also geared toward eliminating some of the problems the university had retrieving its backup tapes after Katrina, he said. Although the school didn't lose any data, it had to wait three weeks to access the tapes, which were stored on the sixth floor of a building in downtown New Orleans

Meanwhile, Burgard is still trying to replace eight IT workers -- nearly one-fifth of his 45-person staff. A recent advertisement for a senior networking position that before the storm would likely have garnered about 20 r'sum's netted just four, he said. In addition, he received only two r'sum's for a senior database administrator slot.

Also working to fill IT positions is Ochsner Clinic Foundation, which operates a 600-bed hospital on its main campus in New Orleans and 35 clinics throughout Louisiana. Ochsner lost 23 workers from its 150-member IT staff after the storm, said Bill Saussaye, director of information services operations. The health care provider has managed to fill some application development jobs with local workers but is using contractors to temporarily fill positions in networking and communications, Saussaye said.

Ochsner is also aiming to complete several disaster recovery projects before June. One involves the installation of redundant Freon and chilled-water cooling systems in the company's primary data center -- a plan prompted by its inability at times to generate enough power to chill the water in the existing system after Katrina hit. Saussaye said he also is looking to set up a remote data center at least 100 miles away from New Orleans and hot sites for Ochsner's distributed systems