This paper considers the design of efficient quantizers for a distributed source coding system. The information is encoded at independent terminals and transmitted across separate channels, any of which may fail. The scenario subsumes a wide range of vector quantization problems. Greedy descent methods rely heavily on initialization, and the presence of numerous ?poor? local optima on the distortion cost surface strongly motivates the use of a global design algorithm. We propose a deterministic annealing approach for the design of all components of a generic distributed source coding system. Our approach avoids many poor local optima, is independent of initialization, and does not assume any prior information on the underlying source distribution. Simulation results show significant gains over an iterative greedy algorithm.