Clans, families, and sites
The MultiSite environment consists of clans, families and sites, which are all distinct groupings of replicated databases.
A clan consists of all replicas of a database set. Within a clan, replicas are grouped into replica families. A replica family is all the replicas of a specific database. Schema repositories and user databases belong to separate replica families. For user databases, the family name is the same as the database name. The family name of a schema repository is always MASTR.
A site is a named collection of replicas in the same clan that reside at the same location. Each site has a schema repository replica and at most one replica from each user database family. Each site is served by a synchronization server, which receives and sends update packets to replicas within its family. Updates for a site can contain updates to the user database replicas, the schema repository replica, or both.