With the growing demand of big data computing, the processing speed of the cluster needs to be improved rapidly. However, the processing performance of the existing big data framework can not satisfy the requirement of the computing development gradually. As the framework of the storage is distributed, the placement of data to be processed has become one of the key factors affecting the performance of the cluster. Firstly, the current distributed file system structure was introduced. Then the popular data placement algorithms were summarized and classified according to different optimization goals, such as network load balance, energy saving and fault tolerance. Finally, future challenges and research directions in the area of storage framework and algorithms were presented.