In the rising tide of the Internet of things, more and more things in the world are connected to the Internet. Recently, data have kept growing at a rate more than four times of that expected in Moore’s law. This explosion of data comes from various sources such as mobile phones, video cameras and sensor networks, which often present multidimensional characteristics. The huge amount of data brings many challenges on the management, transportation, and processing IT infrastructures. To address these challenges, the state-of-art large scale data center networks have begun to provide cloud services that are increasingly prevalent. However, how to build a good data center remains an open challenge. Concurrently, the architecture design, which significantly affects the total performance, is of great research interest. This paper surveys advances in data center network design. In this paper we first introduce the upcoming trends in the data center industry. Then we review some popular design principles for today’s data center network architectures. In the third part, we present some up-to-date data center frameworks and make a comprehensive comparison of them. During the comparison, we observe that there is no so-called optimal data center and the design should be different referring to the data placement, replication, processing, and query processing. After that, several existing challenges and limitations are discussed. According to these observations, we point out some possible future research directions.