Aaron Bertrand shows us how to partition on the cheap:
The TL;DR of this is that you can use filtered indexes to keep all of your “hot data” in a separate physical structure, and even on separate underlying hardware (you may have a fast SSD or PCIe drive available, but it can’t hold the whole table).
Using filtered indexes is an interesting way of solving issues that partitioning normally would help you out with. I’m looking forward to the next part in the series.