It's easy to be nostalgic for the days of big iron servers or clusters that were around for years as a sort of network landmarks. We used to have dev and QA clusters named after movie monsters and you'd get some great hallway conversations about who was using Godzilla that week.

Made for great mascot toys and posters on the rack doors.

A server can be around for years and years why being different. For instance my main debian package server has been "basson" since 2003. In 2003 it was a large, old SGI server; later on it became a 1U rack server, that was replaced a couple of times; nowadays it's a VM. But the internal sources.list still points to "basson" :)

(My machines all have musical instrument names).

That's a great scheme. I hope that one day amongst the university computer labs named for Greek/Roman mythology or rock artists, we have a lab of anime characters. At least at my uni, I think a lot of people would get a kick out of that.