Yahoo! will take its latest – reportedly successful – Computing Coop data center design, tried for the first time with the company’s latest facility in New York State, to Switzerland. The Internet company’s next YCC data center, located in Avenches, is due to come online sometime in 2011, said Scott Noteboom, head of global data center operations at Yahoo!.

Unlike the most recent Lockport, N.Y., facility, however, the company will re-purpose an existing building instead of constructing the data center from the ground up. Noteboom told DatacenterDynamics that although the Avenches data center will be somewhat smaller and a retrofit of an existing building - a manufacturing facility built in 1966 - the company will still be able to leverage the short time-to-build, comparatively low cost and energy efficiency of the YCC design employed in Lockport.

Most of YCC's energy efficiency is achieved by the way it handles cooling. "It’s the integration of the outside air with the building and, in essence, the server,"Noteboom said. The building is designed and positioned so that it captures cool outside air (taking in consideration wind patterns from the nearby Great Lakes) without the use of air handlers, using mostly the collective power of server fans to draw air in, combined with a few fans for air re-direction.

Look for a feature on Yahoo!’s Lockport data center in the latest issue of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS

Noteboom expects the new facility to have a similar average PUE to that of the Lockport data center: 1.08. The facility was officially launched in September.

Energy efficiency was not the only point of pride for the team associated with design of the facility in New York State. It was also the fastest and cheapest Yahoo! was ever able to build out data center capacity, according to an earlier FOCUS interview with Noteboom. The project has been on track to fit within the initially allocated $150m and Noteboom’s team was able to bring the time-to-build down to less than six months per one 10MW phase.

YCC is the company’s fifth-generation data center design.