Microsoft announced a new edition of Windows 10 Pro on Thursday with features designed to work well with server-grade PC hardware. Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, unveiled via blog post, can be used by enterprises to support mission critical workloads.

Rumors of this new version of the OS started circling in June 2017, when a leaked slide was released to Twitter. As reported by TechRepublic's Nick Heath at the time, the leaked specs seem to point to an OS that could power the work of 3D rendering or even researchers training machine learning systems.

According to the post, Microsoft built the OS with feedback from Windows Insiders. One of the core features is the resilient file system (ReFS). "ReFS is designed to be resilient to data corruption, optimized for handling large data volumes, auto-correcting and more. It protects your data with integrity streams on your mirrored storage spaces," the post said.

ReFS can also tell when a company's data becomes corrupted on one of the drives, according to the post. If that happens, it will find a healthy copy of the data to use on one of the other drives instead.

Persistent memory will also be a part of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, the post said. Non-volatile memory modules (NVDIMM-N) will boost performance with faster read and write speeds, and data will remain even after a machine is powered off.

A new feature called SMB Direct will also enable faster file sharing as well, being that it supports network adapters with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities, the post said. These kinds of adapters with this functionality offer low latency, and use little amounts of CPU. With this, apps accessing large data sets will get increased throughput as well.

Users will be able to run Windows 10 Pro for Workstations on machines with server-grade Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors with up to four CPUs. That doubles the pre-existing limit of two CPUs. Also, it supports machines with up to 6TB of memory, tripling the previous 2TB limit, the post said.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations will be delivered with Microsoft's Fall Creators Update later this year.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

1.   Windows 10 Pro for Workstations is a new edition of the OS that supports power users running high-end, server-grade hardware.

2.   A resilient file system, persistent memory, and an SMB Direct feature offer lower latency, faster file transfer, and more.

3.   Expanded hardware support means users can run the new OS on machines with up to four CPUs and up to 6TB of memory.