So they make fun of the customer, and yet if you took a good look you'd find a server named "Gandalf," and one named "Spock," and one named "HAL9000," etc. How do I know this? EVERY server farm has these names somewhere. Geeks, go figure.

Bubba wrote: "So they make fun of the customer, and yet if you took a good look you'd find a server named "Gandalf," and one named "Spock," and one named "HAL9000," etc. How do I know this? EVERY server farm has these names somewhere. "

Not so much anymore, especially in large data centers such as those discussed in the article. Even if the bean counters hadn't squashed such creativity with their reams of inane policies, it's just too hard to keep track of names like that when you have hundred or thousands of servers. These days the server names are much more likely to be something like xxxWEBP204, if not H100024.

No server names like this in my data center.

We make the admins create a name relevant to its duty.

Although in a previous job, we did everything as characters from Tolkein. The boss' computer was Smaug. As in lays around counting money instead of actual work.

What about server farms in space? If we are going to have hotels in space by 2012, we can have server farms before that and they won't need too much heating! LOL! This is a great article... "save the servers"

@Bubba: I doubt that these data centers have named servers at all (of course they will have a name, but they will be computer generated, perhaps just random letters and numbers). These centers have hundreds, if not thousands of individual servers, and no one is going to bother naming them all.

Usually in big data centers, they name the servers based on a number of things, like what os its running, the hardware vendor, whether its for consumer use or for test use or for developer use, whether its passive or active server, etc etc. I have seen some crazy names in my days though that don't adhere to any standards or relevancy.

Yes, there is a Gandalf out there, along with Arwen, Aragorn, bilfor and others from LotR. Have not seen Spock or HAL9000, but I'm sure they're somewhere.

.... Don

I believe we recently saw a cloud 'burst' and a whole lot of people lost all their cell phone contact info, emails, etc... I notice IBM is not talking about that disaster.

I heard that George Foremen just opened his first data center. All the servers are named George.

In the early 1980s, the two mainframes at at the Naval Oceanography Command Center Guam were "Bert" and "Ernie" and the two at the Naval Oceanography Command Center Honolulu were "Ham" and "Eggs". I've forgotten what these computers were called in Rota Spain, Norfolk Virginia and Suitland Maryland but the names were replaced in the late 1980s. It seemed that some ship driving Naval Officers switched to Meteorologist and these names just weren't "miliary enough" for them...

Redundancy, that is the key, but I doubt that is built into the system, bean counters etc. it is all doomed to failure..

It will take at least one or two major catastrophic failures until the fallacy of this system is proven out. When will this happen? Who knows, but happen it will.

My servers were named after Godzilla and all of the monsters that he fought over the years in those over the top monster movies!

"( What about server farms in space? If we are going to have hotels in space by 2012, we can have server farms before that and they won't need too much heating! LOL! This is a great article... "save the servers" )"

That would be even more of a challenge than keeping server farms cool here on the surface. In space, there would be nowhere for the heat to radiate... so cooling would need to be even more power consuming.

Data mining is here to stay. Unless you live in the wilds of Montana, etc, grow your own food, work for cash under the table, have no bank accounts, credit cards, supermarket discount cards, library cards, and email addresses you are fair game for any and all public and private databases to gather information on what you do, what you buy, and your thoughts are as expressed in blogs or a forum like this one. We have surpassed anything that George Orwell could have ever conceived. And, to all those data miners reading this, I like my coffee strong and usually have 2 cups in the morning.

I've only got a few computers in my network, therefore I use Goofy, Daffy, Mickey, Minnie, etc.

Hmmm, My company has server names like Larry, Curly, and Moe. I guess we're just not cool enough.

back in the day before the internet became commercial, a LOT of the machines on the internet were Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) "VAX" machines. A major node map back then was orders of magnitude simpler than it would be today, and those node machines often had names from fiction. However one of my favorite was a twist on the hardware : turtlevax. It's true that these days host machines are so plentiful that they will be more like license plates than famous elven princes.

My server names all indicate what services they run in some way. You're another misinformed customer Bubba. Users, go figure.

I'm happy to work in an environment that's still small enough to allow us some creativity in server names. We picked a theme and ran with it. So now we have servers with names like Augusta, Pinehurst, SpyGlassHill, Oakmont and Doral.

We figure that while we're at work, we can at least do things to remind ourselves of what we do when we're not at work.

Sometimes the debates on what to name a new server are the high points of the day.

We had server names like that. We found that Managers in large installations who allowed those kind of names lacked vision and spent too much time letting the technology drive the business instead of the business driving the technology. We ended up with a mixture of technologies that very few people know that only support a few applications with zero documentation. This reeks havoc when the people who know how it all works leave or retire. Standards and documentation are a good thing fellow geeks, including the names of your servers! It allows me to take a vacation.

As a compter science grad student, we had thor and Mo, larry & Curly servers.

Re: server names, I changed my company's environment from random Godzilla monsters to "meaningful identifiers" when I came here. App01, App02, ... DB01, DB02, ... etc. are much easier to respond to than Godzilla, Godzuki, Mothra et al.

Creativity is great and I was sorry to kill it, but when someone new has to jump in and troubleshoot you want them to know what's broken immediately, not spend 10 minutes looking for a cheat sheet of which server does what.

My last company had a compromise system: servers we grouped in naming categories based on what they did. Trees (web servers), Dead Artists (database servers), Gemstones & Minerals (Mail) - If you know the taxonomy you know what's broken, and the number of groups is finite (and small).

Server hugging may sound innocuous or even silly, but it has profound implications for carbon footprints. If you don't know the exact location of your data center, then you can't verify that they are taking steps to minimize their carbon footprint.

Anonymity is a perfect way to avoid accountability.