Emerging mobile and cloud applications drive everincreasing capacity demands, particularly for short-reach optical communications, where low-cost and low-power solutions are highly required. Spatial division multiplexing (SDM) techniques provide a promising way to scale up the lane count per fiber, while reducing the number of fiber connections and patch cords, and hence simplifying cabling complexity. This talk will address challenges on both system and network levels, and report our recent development on SDM techniques for optical data center networks.