The Yahoo! Computing Coop (YCC) data center design (formerly “Chicken Coop”), only works in areas with low humidity. When a Japanese data center engineer asked Mozan Totani, project manager for data center development at Yahoo! whether they could build a coop-style data center in Tokyo, Totani said they could not because of Tokyo’s high humidity levels.

But an Internet company like Yahoo! cannot afford to be restricted to low-humidity regions in its data center location choices. To place infrastructure in places inappropriate for the coop, but still take advantage of the streamlined conveyor-belt approach to deploying capacity the coop enables, the company deploys what it calls Yahoo! Thermal Cooling (YTC).

Totani delivered a keynote presentation at the DatacenterDynamics conference in San Francisco Tuesday, where he offered an update on Yahoo!’s data center infrastructure strategy.

High-humidity regions do not allow for direct-evaporative cooling, which Yahoo! supplements free-cooling capacity with at its YCC data centers, he said.

Inside its data centers, the company deploys IT capacity in hot-aisle-contained pods. The company builds racks, populates them with servers and connects them at a centralized factory, shipping fully integrated plug-and-play racks to data center sites.

For YCC deployments, the racks are arranged in two rows, forming a pod with a hot aisle between them. The servers take cold air from the data center environment and exhaust hot air into the hot aisle, from where it travels into the coop’s “attic” and gets exhausted out of the building.

A YTC is also a pre-fabricated two-row pod, but with a cooling unit on top that uses a chilled-water-based cooling loop. Cold air drops down from the cooling unit between two rack rows and gets pulled in by server fans.

Once exhausted on the other side, warm air rises to the top due to its buoyancy properties and gets pulled back into the cooling unit.

It does require a raised floor, but there is no air blowing through perforated tiles. The raised floor is there strictly to make room for chilled-water piping and power distribution.

Like YCC pods, the YTC uses a simple commoditized design, Totani said.

Yahoo! has so far built four data centers to the YCC design. These projects were part of the company’s ongoing global data center infrastructure consolidation project. Three facilities use the YTC approach.

The company announced Monday that it has a new CEO. Marissa Mayer, one of top Google executives, took the job after 13 years at Google.