We reached a point where it was just becoming painful to keep track of them - what a server did and where it was located. When you only have a handful of machines at one location, it's not a big deal. But once that number grows, and especially if spans multiple data centers, cute or geeky naming schemes tend to fall apart.

"Wait, was Magneto the master DB or the NFS server? Did we move DB off there? Is it in Atlanta, or San Francisco, or Phoenix?"

Eventually we reached a point where we had a spreadsheet mapping hostnames to architecture functions and physical locations. We realized that, even though our naming scheme was cool, it wasn't going to scale much further.