Adaptive Server communicates with other Adaptive Servers, Open Server applications (such as Backup Server), and client software on your network. Clients can talk to one or more servers, and servers can communicate with other servers by remote procedure calls.
For Sybase products to interact with one another, each product needs to know where the others reside on the network. This information is stored in the interfaces file (sql.ini on Windows) or in an LDAP server.