•The art on airflow distribution and management in data center is reviewed.•Experimental and numerical investigations of several typical cases are summed.•Energy efficiency of air distribution must be based on the reliability of data center.•HACS is a promising air management system due to its flexibility and extendability.•Improvement methods of vertical airflow uniformity needs to be developed. Rapid expansions of high-density data centers have been triggered worldwide owing to the high demand of cloud computing over the past decade. The airflow distribution and management have great association with the thermal performance of the typical underfloor air distribution (UFAD) data center. Therefore, numbers of configurations and methods have been proposed to improve the thermal performance of data centers with various operation conditions. This paper reviews the ventilation configurations of data center and presents the geometric effects of underfloor plenum on airflow. The experimental and numerical investigations on typical cases as well as the relevant parameters are also summed up. Various air management methods including cold aisle containment system(CACS), hot aisle containment system(HACS) and vertical exhausted duct system(VEDS) are analyzed on the benefits and limitations. Based on the enormous amount of research on the traditional UFAD system with hot aisle/cold aisle (HA/CA) arrangement, it can be concluded that the practices of data centers have a tendency of being more flexible and extendable, while the literature on the corresponding cases which applied HACS or other air distribution systems remains scarce. Moreover, beside the improvement of the airflow uniformity along the cold aisle, methods for enhancing the airflow uniformity along the height direction are also encouraged to be developed.