I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.