Customer story

Copart Delivers Real-Time Inventory Search to Auto Buyers with MariaDB

Copart moved its non-auction applications from aging AS400 systems to MariaDB on commodity hardware, gaining real-time inventory search, failover in under two minutes and built-in encryption for EU compliance.

About Copart

Global Auction Giant Copart is a global leader in online, real-time auto auctions. Founded in 1982 by Willis J. Johnson and headquartered in Dallas, the publicly traded company operates over 200 locations across 12 countries, including 165 yards in the US. Facilitating transactions for banks, insurance companies, and individual owners, Copart intakes approximately 40,000 vehicles daily, maintains an active inventory of up to 170,000 vehicles, and sells a car every 50 seconds.

Outgrowing Legacy Architecture

For years, the engine driving this massive operation – Copart’s patented virtual auctioning technology was powered by reliable but aging legacy AS400 enterprise systems. This legacy architecture managed a massive footprint of nearly 33 terabytes of data, processing 300 transactions per second. However, as Copart aggressively expanded its global presence, growing its business by 20% year-over-year, this rigid system became a critical roadblock. Scaling the AS400 required expensive proprietary hardware, and it lacked the agility needed to quickly roll out new, sophisticated features for customers. International data compliance regulations, such as those required to operate in Germany, mandated that Copart keep its data within the EU with full encryption both at rest and in motion—capabilities that its aging legacy infrastructure struggled to support efficiently.

“We want to roll out products that are sophisticated by design, but very simple to use for our customers. To achieve this, we need a technological system, which is agile and light… MariaDB fits most of our needs. It was the most optimal fit that we found.”

Pravin Malali

Senior Database Administrator, Copart

Why MariaDB?

Copart needed an infrastructure that was agile and light, and began evaluating open-source technologies. They needed a platform that could scale flexibly, reduce operational overhead, and meet stringent security mandates. MariaDB quickly emerged as the perfect fit. Because MariaDB is SQL-compliant, the team was able to migrate their existing AS400 database objects, stored procedures, and functions with minimal developer retraining. Most importantly, MariaDB supported native encryption for data at rest and SSL connectivity for data in motion, instantly solving Copart’s European compliance challenges. By allowing Copart to run operations on commodity hardware rather than expensive enterprise machines, MariaDB offered a highly cost-effective business model.

Architecting for Scale and Resilience

The migration was a massive undertaking, but the database team successfully peeled their non-auction applications away from the AS400 and onto a multi-tiered MariaDB environment. Today, this environment manages nearly 3 terabytes of data and handles 160 transactions per second. One of their greatest achievements was building a standalone, real-time data pipeline that replicates data from the AS400 directly into MariaDB, feeding their public search engine so buyers see inventory updates within seconds.

To guarantee continuous uptime for these global operations, Copart deployed 15 MariaDB Galera Clusters, each containing three nodes. They layered the MariaDB MaxScale proxy engine on top to handle intelligent read-write splitting and connection load balancing. For disaster recovery, they established master-master and master-slave replications across geographically separated data centers, ensuring that even in an outage, failover takes less than two minutes. They also optimized their hardware footprint across 14 non-production environments by running multiple database instances on single nodes via port routing, drastically cutting down server bloat.

The Impact

Real-time data pipelines
Data from legacy systems is replicated and available in the website's search engine within seconds.
Seamless scalability
Successfully migrated nearly 3 terabytes of data and non-auction workloads (processing 160 transactions per second) to a modern architecture.
Cost efficiency
Transitioned from expensive legacy enterprise hardware to cost-effective commodity hardware, reducing operational and administrative costs.
Global compliance
Achieved immediate compliance with strict international data laws through native data encryption at rest and in motion.

Looking Ahead

The transition to MariaDB has allowed Copart to maintain its competitive edge and continue its rapid global expansion. By embracing a flexible, secure, and open-source database infrastructure, Copart has laid the groundwork to eventually migrate its core auction engine entirely off legacy hardware.