Depends on the size of the organization and how many servers they have and who you are working with. In the above case, the question was how to direct technici

Depends on the size of the organization and how many servers they have and who you are working with. In the above case, the question was how to direct technicians to gear - and, specifying a physical location and a faceplate label (Serial Number or what have you) does the job. In the case of Humans - they usually have cnames for the function they are interested in anyways. I do work on about 4500 servers - and I couldn't tell you the name of a single one of them (though, I note they have some long convoluted DNS PTR, even harder to understand than a serial number) - But, I have a ton of cnames when I want to login to a particular customers server (based on customer, production/test/dev/fste, function). Teams that need to do maintenance on servers have tools that group them based on role, location, data center, etc... They never actually "ssh" into a server the way I might. A lot depends on whether you are talking about scales of 100+, 1000+, or 10,000+ servers (or network devices for that matter) At each stage you start to lose more and more of human naming convention, and move everything into a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)