Recovery Appliance is a cloud-scale Engineered System designed to protect all Oracle Databases in your enterprise. Built on a scalable architecture and integrated with Recovery Manager (RMAN), it uses a fully fault-tolerant and scalable hardware to provide a centralized, incremental-forever backup strategy for a large number of databases.

Recovery Appliance provides enhanced data protection and availability for the enterprise. Real-time redo transport enables data protection to the last sub-second, dramatically reducing recovery point objectives across the entire enterprise. Backup and restore processing is offloaded to the Recovery Appliance thus freeing production database resources and boosting their performance.

Backups are stored and managed in a centralized disk pool. An initial full backup followed by successive incremental backups is sufficient to protect your production databases. Incremental backups are indexed and stored as they are received by the appliance. Recovery Appliance provides virtual full backups, each of which is a complete database image as of one distinct point in time, to recover databases to any specified time within the recovery window. Virtual full backups are automatically created by Recovery Appliance for every incremental backup that it receives. Virtual backups enable the rapid reconstruction of a full backup to a point-in-time within the user's recovery window.

The Recovery Appliance metadata database manages the metadata for all backups stored on the Recovery Appliance and contains the Recovery Appliance catalog.