VRTX SATA Support Workaround

I know that VRTX officially only supports SAS in their DAS/SAN. I was wondering however if the backplane was SAS specific. I know it connects with the motherboard through SAS cables but so do many other servers which support SATA. 

The VRTX does support the PERC H730 (at least according to the driver manifest) which in turn supports SATA. I've not seen any documentation on installing any other RAID cards besides the SPERC8 into the VRTX though. If I install a SATA-supported RAID controller could I fudge the use of SATA drives in the SAN?