The vast majority of firms have no plans to try grid computing, perceiving the technology as too costly, complicated or insecure, according to research published today by systems integrator Morse.

The report says that under a tenth of firms have adopted or are planning to adopt grid technology, which is designed to let businesses cluster servers and pool resources for processing- intensive tasks.

The survey of 100 UK IT directors also found that almost a third believe the technology is too expensive, while a further 34 percent say it is too complicated. Peter Critchley, strategy director at Morse, accused IT infrastructure vendors of fostering these views by focusing on high-level issues, rather than practical benefits. “Vendors are selling dreams rather than linking [the technology] back to real-world uses,” he said.

Critchley argued that IT managers would be more interested if vendors clearly explained benefits such as improved business responsiveness, higher datacentre utilisation rates, and the ability to handle peaks and troughs in demand for computing power.

However, advocates of the technology, including Sun and Oracle, insisted adoption is climbing as the emergence of new middleware and pre-configured grids make deployment simpler.

Sun’s Paul Leonard said that confusion over what constitutes a grid means adoption is higher than the survey suggests. “Some people call it grid, but others call it high-performance computing or clustering,” he explained.