Data storage company NetApp Inc. easily topped Wall Street’s fiscal second-quarter estimates thanks to strong sales of its all-flash storage arrays that led to a big boost in its annual revenue run rate.

But the performance was undone by somewhat disappointing guidance for the next quarter, sending its stock down by almost 6 percent in after-hours trading.

The company reported revenue for the quarter of $1.52 billion, up 7 percent from the same period a year ago. Earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation came in at $1.06 per share. Analysts had forecast an adjusted profit of just 99 cents per share on revenue of $1.51 billion.

NetApp said it ended the quarter with $4.3 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments, amid strong growth across its entire portfolio of products. In particular, it highlighted its all-flash array annualized net revenue run rate of $2.2 billion, up 29 percent from a year ago.

Still, shareholder sentiment was tempered by NetApp’s guidance for the next quarter, which was more or less in line with analysts’ estimates. The company said it’s expecting fiscal third-quarter earnings of $1.12 to $1.18 per share on revenue of $1.55 billion to $1.65 billion. Wall Street had forecast $1.12 per share on revenue of $1.6 billion.

NetApp is one of a host of technology firms struggling to keep investors satisfied amid a slow and ongoing transition of products from hardware to software. For its part, NetApp is trying to shift away from its dependence on hardware sales to newer, software-defined network and storage products. Central to that strategy is NetApp’s new architecture, dubbed Data Fabric, which is designed to simplify and integrate data management across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation.

In a conference call, NetApp Chief Executive George Kurian (pictured) said Data Fabric was growing in popularity as data and storage hubs are becoming more important for artificial intelligence workloads. “I think it’s clearly the cornerstone of our success in the market,” Kurian said in the call.

NetApp has put a lot of effort into its Data Fabric strategy, and during its annual conference last month announced a number of public and hybrid cloud products aimed at improving the architecture in order to make data management easier. The new products included its new NetApp Cloud Insights tool for performance monitoring and cost optimization, plus a new Cloud Tiering Service that can be used to optimize where on-premises data is stored when it’s sent to the cloud.

Kurian appeared as a special guest on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile event livestreaming studio, during last month’s conference, where he discussed how the new products would bolster the company’s Data Fabric strategy:

During the last quarter, the company also found time to buy the Kubernetes startup StackPointCloud Inc. and announce a new partnership and joint venture with Lenovo Group Holding Ltd. that should help it sell more of its products to Chinese companies. The joint venture with Lenovo is encouraging because analysts see NetApp’s partnerships as being critical for its future growth. It builds on earlier collaborations with Amazon Web Services Inc. and, more recently, Google LLC.

“The focus on multi- and hybrid cloud support for storage and the new partnership with Google in regards to persistent storage and Google Cloud platform will be good growth drivers to measure in the coming quarters,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “Now it’s execution time for NetApp and it will have to show continued growth in the coming quarters.”

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