What to do with Healthy (Recovery Partition), what's the use?

[Grr]

Hi All,
For my new Sony Vaio laptop I see the following partitions:
1. Healthy-recovery Partition (11.61Gb)
2. System Reserved (100Mb)
3. C: - OS (454.05Gb)

pic-attached.

Laptop is just opened so nothing is changed.
As this is my first time for a new laptop & for Windows-7 I'm not able to understand what is this Healthy-recovery Partition (11.61Gb) for? Is it required or not? How is it useful?

I googled and read couple of posts but nothing is clear to me.

Appreciate your help.

Thanks,
Grr