The traditional data center is built on a three-tier infrastructure with discreet blocks of compute, storage and network resources allocated to support specific applications. In a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the three tiers are combined into a single building block called a node. Multiple nodes can be clustered together to form a pool of resources that can be managed through a software layer.
Instead of a server with 50 cores, 128GB RAM and 1TB of storage, you can have 500 cores with 1.2TB RAM and 10TB of storage across 10 nodes, presented as a pool of resources to mix and match into services that deliver the specific performance characteristics and back-end resources needed for the job at hand. Configuration can be done on the fly, through an easy-to-access interface that lets you build or scale your solution.