About us

Company history

Originally based in Teddington, south-west London, Fenestra was formed in 1990 when development began on the first of our core products - the Incentive Management System. After moving down the road - and across the Thames - to Kingston, we grew our experience, building specialised helpdesks and customer care applications, particularly for house builders.

In 2006, events prompted something of a new approach. In the long, hot summer days, with air conditioning humming away and five servers providing client hosting and internal services, we suffered a severe machine failure (a RAID array controller).

Working almost straight through, basic client service was restored the following day, but only after normal Windows backups had failed to restore because the replacement hardware was not identical to the failed server.

Around the same time, an electricity bill arrived that was almost equivalent to a full time salary. Our reviews suggested that virtualising the servers would address both issues - resilience and energy consumption.

Over the next couple of years we built up expertise in virtualisation for the small business and in greener, energy-saving solutions in general. Now, the same workload is delivered with only one or two physical servers. 70% of the energy bill was saved - or would have been had the electricity price not gone up.

Next we are planning to install a 6 kW wind turbine at our northern office and to exploit the potential of Android tablets in saving yet more energy in the delivery of the virtualised desktop.