The challenging problem in building a reliable storage system over a network of peers is to account for the heterogenity of peers in terms of their availability, storage capacity, locality. With varying object access patterns, an efficient/reliable system should not only increase the availability of more frequently accessed objects, but also provide reasonable availability of other objects. In this paper, a greedy heuristic is proposed to improve the total object availability in the system. The simulation experiments compare the heuristic approach to randomized placement of objects with respect to varying failure distributions of peers, number of peers to objects ratio, replication factor and storage at a peer. The results show that this approach can provide equivalent availability with half the storage resources required for random placement.