I did some caching/content distribution/load balancing work for HP many years ago (maybe 10 years ago, now).
The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space.
So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.
I don't know why I find that explanation so much more reassuring than my assumption that it was simply a really sloppy version control hack, to denote upgraded deployments.
Even though there are a bazillion other ways to codify DNS subdomains by region, including some sort of reasonable vernacular for the region, I'm glad it's about locales, regions and perhaps even content delivery or timezones maybe, moreso than version numbers.
Every time I get redirected to something like www2.example.com, I've often wondered which obstinate jerk would refuse to move whatever's on www proper, forcing the entire world to suffer eternity in a purgatory named www2.
Hopefully, all those times, it just turned out that I was in North America, region #2, and maybe region #1 was Antarctica for some reason.
The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space.
So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.