The vendor will supply its OmniSwitch 6850 solution providing connectivity to more than 27,000 users across two UTS campuses in Sydney.
The solution will replace an existing multi-vendor legacy network, reducing the cost and complexity of network operations for UTS.
The 14,000 network ports that make up the access and distribution network will be upgraded in phases by systems integrator, Integ.
The initial phase has already been deployed to address UTS's immediate requirements.
UTS director of IT infrastructure and operations, Peter James, said the university was looking for seamless integration.
"Also, through previous projects with Alcatel-Lucent, built up a level of trust in their solutions," he added.
More universities are responding to the needs of a new generation of tech-savvy faculty and students through network transformations, according to Tom Burns, president of enterprise solutions at Alcatel-Lucent.
"The consolidation of this relationship has contributed to Alcatel-Lucent's continued strong growth in the enterprise sector," Burns said.
UTS, which became a member of Alcatel-Lucent's Research Partner Program in 2003, also selected Alcatel-Lucent in April last year for its 3-D Animation Multimedia Lab, the first of its kind in an Australian university.
Developing 3-D animations requires sophisticated computers and software applications built over a very high-speed network. Users typically require huge bandwidth at Gigabit Ethernet speeds to meet the demands of a distributed rendering solution.
UTS selected the Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 9700 to support the core and the Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6800 to support the edge of the network in the lab, which is made up of 50 Quad Mac G5 workstations, two Apple X Servers and 19 dedicated render cluster nodes.
The two switches are linked together via 10 Gigabit Ethernet in order to deliver maximum performance to simultaneous users.